Medical Image Processing

Yesterday, NVIDIA announced, to release an OpenCL (Open Computing Language) driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL  Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

OpenCL is being created by the Khronos Group with the participation of many industry-leading companies and institutions including AMD, Apple, Broadcom, IBM, Intel,  NVIDIA and many more. OpenCL aims to be the first royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. It provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code for high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices using a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as DSPs.

Developers can apply to become a GPU Computing Registered Developer at:  www.nvidia.com/opencl. I registered for it. So look forward to some interesting OpenCL code in a future post.

The invent of CUDA offered a new flexibility for scientific programming of the graphic card without the need to learn special graphic languages. However, getting your stuff to work with CUDA is not always that easy due to compiler limitations. For porting old code, you are most likely required to write complete parts new.

Intel announced already some time ago a new GPU code-named Larrabee. It is likely that Intel targets also the scientific programming community, as the platform has some nice benefits:

1. It is x86 compatible and your code will run with a simple recompilation.
2. Full support for OpenMP or Intel TBB.
3. Enhanced 512-bit vector processing units.

However, yet no hardware prototypes are available but writing code is already possible as Intel  provided some C++ implementation of the new Larrabee instruction set extension called LRBni. First prototypes are expected for the end of 2009.

First Medical Experiences at the Fully3D?

At this years Fully3D conference a high-performance workshop will take place. According to the topic list, Larrabee seems to be of some importance. Maybe we will see first prototype applications in Beijing 2009.

For those who don’t want to wait until then, check out these links for more information:

• First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions (LRBni)
• Intel fact sheet about Larrabee
• Intel’s SIGGRAPH 2008 paper on Larrabee