Previous  |  Next

Thu

06.07.07

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Google's Acquisition of Peakstream

Google's acquisition of Peakstream is obviously relevant to the theme we've been sounding here recently about the importance of concurrent programming. Nat wrote about this in backchannel email after my previous blog post, but I thought his comment was appropriate to share more widely.

Nat picked up on one of Adam Beberg's comments about Folding@home's use of GPUs from the IP thread I pointed to earlier. I didn't reproduce this quote in the original post, but it was in the full email thread I'd sent around internally:

We use BrookGPU (also out of Stanford) to fold on the GPU's and manage the insane hardware under the hood, and actually manage to be computationally limited not bandwidth limited. It's a very simple way of hiding all the complexity and nothing a run of the mill programmer can't use - our GPU code is by a chemist. Yes he knows what's under the hood, but it's all hidden by Brook so it's mostly trial and error until you hit the hardware limits.

Nat then pointed out:

Google just bought a company that makes programming tools for general purpose GPU programming. GPUs are a new source of parallel computation. They used to be used to just handle graphics tasks but now companies like nVidia are making general purpose GPUs for arbitrary computation.


tags:   | comments: 3   | Sphere It
submit:

 

0 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://orm3.managed.sonic.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2120

Comments: 3

Jack   [06.07.07 11:06 AM]

To quote The Register:
"PeakStream's main rival RadpidMind must be feeling good with the multi-threaded code shift game all to itself."

Perhaps all these aquisitions by Google does benefits other companies.

Carson   [06.07.07 04:12 PM]

Check out one of RapidMind's (and previously Peakstream's) competitors, www.acceleware.com. Acceleware now partially owned by NVIDIA. Only company offering turnkey solutions for GPU computing. PeakStream and RapidMind offer software only.

Carson   [06.07.07 05:15 PM]

Oh yeah, Acceleware and RapidMind are both small Canadian companies. Will one, or both, follow in Research in Motion's (Blackberry) footsteps...leading to world renown?


Post A Comment:

 (please be patient, comments may take awhile to post)




Remember Me?


Subscribe to this Site

Radar RSS feed

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

CURRENT CONFERENCES