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Close To Metal
In computing, Close To Metal ("CTM" in short, originally called ''Close-to-the-Metal'') is the name of a beta version of a low-level programming interface developed by ATI, now the AMD Graphics Product Group, aimed at enabling GPGPU computing. CTM was short-lived, and the first production version of AMD's GPGPU technology is now called AMD Stream SDK, or rather the current AMD APP SDK for Windows and Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. APP stands for "Accelerated Parallel Processing" and also targets Heterogeneous System Architecture. Overview Close To Metal, originally called THIN (Thin Hardware INterface) and Data Parallel Virtual Machine, gave developers direct access to the native instruction set and memory of the massively parallel computational elements in modern AMD video cards. CTM bypassed the graphics-centric DirectX and OpenGL APIs for the GPGPU programmer to expose previously unavailable low-level functionality, including direct control of the stream processors/ALUs and the memor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, engineering, mathematical, technological and social aspects. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology and software engineering. The term "computing" is also synonymous with counting and calculating. In earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by mechanical computing machines, and before that, to human computers. History The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper (or for chalk and slate) with or without the aid of tables. Computing is intimately tied to the representation of numbers, though mathematical conc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
End User License Agreement
An end-user license agreement or EULA () is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user, generally made available to the customer via a retailer acting as an intermediary. A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restrictions which apply to the use of the software. Form contracts for digital services (such as terms of service and privacy policies) were traditionally presented on paper (see shrink-wrap agreement) but are now often presented digitally via browsewrap or clickwrap formats. As the user may not see the agreement until after they have already purchased or engaged with the software, these documents may be contracts of adhesion. Software companies often make special agreements with large businesses and government entitles that include support contracts and specially drafted warranties. Many EULAs assert extensive liability limitations. Most commonly, an EULA will attempt to hold harmless the software licensor in the event that the software cau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kibibyte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol () refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The first bit is number 0, making the eighth bit number 7. The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shader
In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of specialized functions in computer graphics special effects and video post-processing, as well as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Traditional shaders calculate rendering effects on graphics hardware with a high degree of flexibility. Most shaders are coded for (and run on) a graphics processing unit (GPU), though this is not a strict requirement. ''Shading languages'' are used to program the GPU's rendering pipeline, which has mostly superseded the fixed-function pipeline of the past that only allowed for common geometry transforming and pixel-shading functions; with shaders, customized effects can be used. The position and color (hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast) of all pixels, vertices, and/or textures us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stream Programming
In computer science, stream processing (also known as event stream processing, data stream processing, or distributed stream processing) is a programming paradigm which views data streams, or sequences of events in time, as the central input and output objects of computation. Stream processing encompasses dataflow programming, reactive programming, and distributed data processing. Stream processing systems aim to expose parallel processing for data streams and rely on streaming algorithms for efficient implementation. The software stack for these systems includes components such as programming models and query languages, for expressing computation; stream management systems, for distribution and scheduling; and hardware components for acceleration including floating-point units, graphics processing units, and field-programmable gate arrays. The stream processing paradigm simplifies parallel software and hardware by restricting the parallel computation that can be performed. Gi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lib Sh
Sh was an early metaprogramming language for programmable GPUs. It offered a general-purpose programming language, following a stream-processing model. Programs written in Sh could either run on CPUs or GPUs, obviating the need to write programs in a mix of two programming languages as was the case with earlier GPU programming systems such as Cg or HLSL. As of August 2006, it is no longer maintained. RapidMind Inc. was formed to commercialize the research behind Sh. RapidMind was then bought by Intel and ceased Sh development as well. See also *BrookGPU *CUDA *Close to Metal *OpenCL *RapidMind RapidMind Inc. was a privately held company founded and headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, acquired by Intel in 2009. It provided a software product that aims to make it simpler for software developers to target multi-core processors and ... References External links * GPGPU GPGPU libraries {{Compu-graphics-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BrookGPU
The Brook programming language and its implementation BrookGPU were early and influential attempts to enable general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Brook, developed at Stanford University graphics group, was a compiler and runtime implementation of a stream programming language targeting modern, highly parallel GPUs such as those found on ATI or Nvidia graphics cards. BrookGPU compiled programs written using the Brook stream programming language, which is a variant of ANSI C. It could target OpenGL v1.3+, DirectX v9+ or AMD's Close to Metal for the computational backend and ran on both Microsoft Windows and Linux. For debugging, BrookGPU could also simulate a virtual graphics card on the CPU. Status The last major beta release (v0.4) was in October 2004 but renewed development began and stopped again in November 2007 with a v0.5 beta 1 release. The new features of v0.5 include a much upgraded and faster OpenGL backend which uses framebuffer objects instead of PBu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CUDA
CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach called general-purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU). CUDA is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for the execution of compute kernels. CUDA is designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. This accessibility makes it easier for specialists in parallel programming to use GPU resources, in contrast to prior APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL, which required advanced skills in graphics programming. CUDA-powered GPUs also support programming frameworks such as OpenMP, OpenACC and OpenCL; and HIP by compiling such code to CUDA. CUDA was created by Nvidia. When it was first introduced, the name was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architectur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ROCm
ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP ( GPU-kernel-based programming), OpenMP/ Message Passing Interface (MPI) ( directive-based programming), OpenCL. ROCm is free, libre and open-source software (except the GPU firmware blobs), it is distributed under various licenses. Background The first GPGPU software stack from ATI/AMD was Close to Metal, which became Stream. ROCm was launched around 2016 with the Boltzmann Initiative. ROCm stack builds upon previous AMD GPU stacks, some tools trace back to GPUOpen, others to the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). Heterogeneous System Architecture HSA was aimed at producing a middle-level, hardware-agnostic intermediate representation, that could be JIT-compiled to the ev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OpenCL
OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies programming languages (based on C99, C++14 and C++17) for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism. OpenCL is an open standard maintained by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. Conformant implementations are available from Altera, AMD, ARM, Creative, IBM, Imagination, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Vivante, Xilinx, and ZiiLABS. Overview OpenCL views a computing system as consisting of a number of ''compute devices'', which migh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Computing
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling.S.V. Adve ''et al.'' (November 2008)"Parallel Computing Research at Illinois: The UPCRC Agenda" (PDF). Parallel@Illinois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The main techniques for these performance benefits—increased clock frequency and smarter but increasingly complex architectures—are now hitting the so-called power wall. The computer industry has accepted that future performance increases must largely come from increasing the number of processors (or cores) on a die, rather than m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beta Version
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help improve the software or fix software bugs still present in the software. There are several models for such a life cycle. A common method is that suggested by Microsoft, which divides software development into five phases: Pre-alpha, Alpha, Beta, Release candidate, and Stable. Pre-alpha refers to all activities performed during the software project before formal testing. The alpha phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs. The beta phase generally begins when the software is deemed feature complete, yet likely to contain several known or unknown bugs. Software in the production phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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