OpenCL doesn't do distributed message passing parallelism, only data
parallel.   From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

*OpenCL provides parallel computing using task-based and data-based
parallelism. *


I doubt that message passing distributed computing will be easy in our
lifetime(s).  Which is just fine by me -- job security!

--Doug

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Marcus G. Daniels <[email protected]>wrote:

> Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> It will be nice when we can try HPC easily at home, so to speak.
>>
> AMD's OpenCL toolkit scales well on Opteron system.   Also, Snow Leopard
> comes with an OpenCL implementation and scales well for small problems on
> the GT9400 and GT9600 found in a MacBook Pro.
>
> http://developer.amd.com/gpu/atistreamsdk/pages/default.aspx
>
> From a educational point of view, the problems of GPUs (high latency) are a
> benefit because an experimenter has to learn how to deal with an
> `unbalanced' design.    In the future, more and more communication will be
> on chip, but asynchronous.   Finding ways to deal with that will be a
> challenge, and the people that have the skills to do it will be at an
> advantage in the HPC market.
>
> There is a lot of useful investment that can be done at a small scale, and
> doesn't require having access to tens of thousands of boxes and fancy
> interconnects.   The hard issues for coarse-grained communication will be
> related to resilience, when nodes go down or give bad results -- in large
> part figuring out algorithms for adapting to a compute fabric that is not
> fixed.   Even researchers that do have access to such fabrics don't have
> direct control over them.   A given, more or less, and you deal with it.
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_opencl_new.html
> http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/opencl/faq
> http://www.pgroup.com/support/downloads.php
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
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