OpenCL

It's not often that the internecine rivalries of the HPC research and development community spill over into the public arena. However, a video recently posted on YouTube (and the associated comments), ostensibly a light-hearted advert for a SC15 tutorial on heterogenous programming, shows how real and deep these rivalries can be.

Programmability of GPUs (or accelerators in general) has improved since the days of the OpenGL shaders. First CUDA, and OpenCL later, have evolved to offer a reasonable way of programming efficient algorithms onto GPUs. However, despite this improvement, there is still a lot of effort involved in the development of code for accelerators. This is inevitable sometimes: if you have a particular algorithm and you want to have the maximum performance possible for a particular accelerator architecture, and you have the time to do it, you can immerse yourself in the marvellous world of CUDA/OpenCL low-level optimisation and stop reading. If time is critical for you, as it is for me, then you will love the latest advance in accelerator programmability: OpenACC.