HiPEAC is the conference on “High-performance and Embedded Architectures and Compilers” to be held on 20 to 22 January in Berlin – tickets are still available, if you can spare three days. I (Vincent Hindriksen) would like to share the program I’m doing.

Edit: I met great people here and hope to see you next year (again).

Read more …

More than two years ago, on 13 January 2010, I wrote my first blog-post. Four months later StreamComputing was both official and unknown. I want to share with you my personal story on how I got to start-up this company.

The push-factor

I wanted to create a company which was about innovative projects –  something I had hardly encountered until then. The years before I programmed parts of A-to-B-flows, as I call them. That is software that is in the base quite simple, but tediously discussed as very, very complex.

“Complex” software

The complexity is not the software, as you can see. It is undocumented APIs, forgotten knowledge, knowledge in heads of unknown people, bossy and demanding people who friendly ask for last-minute architecture changes, deadlines around promotion-rounds, new deadlines due to board-decisions, people being afraid of getting replaced if the software is finished, jealousy if another team makes version 2 of the software, etc. The rule of office-software is therefore understandable:

Software is either unfinished,
or turned into a platform for unintended functionality.

The fun in office-software is there for analyst, architect or manager – the developer just puts in his earphones and makes all the requested changes (hooray for services like Spotify). But as I did not want to become a manager and wished to keep improving my development skills, I had to conclude I was on the wrong track.

More than two years ago, on 13 January 2010, I wrote my first blog-post. Four months later StreamComputing was both official and unknown. I want to share with you my personal story on how I got to start-up this company.

The push-factor

I wanted to create a company which was about innovative projects –  something I had hardly encountered until then. The years before I programmed parts of A-to-B-flows, as I call them. That is software that is in the base quite simple, but tediously discussed as very, very complex.

Complex software

The complexity is not the software, as you can see. It is undocumented APIs, forgotten knowledge, knowledge in heads of unknown people, bossy and demanding people who friendly ask for last-minute architecture changes, deadlines around promotion-rounds, new deadlines due to board-decisions, people being afraid of getting replaced if the software is finished, jealousy if another team makes version 2 of the software, etc. The rule of office-software is therefore understandable:

Software is either unfinished,
or turned into a platform for unintended functionality.

The fun in office-software is there for analyst, architect or manager – the developer just puts in his earphones and makes all the requested changes (hooray for services like Spotify). But as I did not want to become a manager and wished to keep improving my development skills, I had to conclude I was on the wrong track.

Read more …

Since quite some time StreamComputing has shared many research-papers on GPGPU, OpenCL, CUDA, WebCL and more via twitter. This activity has built up a priceless collection of PDFs, which actually got less easy to structure as the collection grew. Recently Evernote came to the rescue and slowly all these PDFs get archived in a way I can find back those papers concerning my current tasks.

Read more …

 With the launch of twitter-channel @OpenCLonARM we now officially show a strong interest in ARM for compute. And we are not the only ones, as the twitter already has 80 followers (60 in 1.5 day and 12 retweets of the welcome-message).

ARM has made tremendous progress in both technology and market-share. With ARM-64, companies like NVidia (and maybe AMD) in the field, X86 seems to be getting a real competitor. This could happen because since a few years computers are fast enough and are not being replaced by a faster one, but a smaller one (tablet, phone) or extra one. By the rules of the market, current technologies are replaced by the ones that give those other needs. ARM is fast (enough), flexible in design, very cheap, low-power and passively cooled. The biggest obstacle seems to be only getting a standard for a docking-station to connect your mobile, tablet or watch to keyboard, mouse and large screen.

OpenCL is perfect for ARM, as it gives the computation-power to the intensive computations not already covered by hardware-support. In the world of X86 this interests high performance and big data companies, where on ARM this interests also more. Without the need for OpenCL you can already watch HD video, with OpenCL you can encode the video with MP4. This year you will certainly hear more about new possibilities of OpenCL on ARM.

What do you think. Why does Intel not sell IP to ARM-companies as many technologies could be reused? Could Intel be the next ARM as an IP-seller, or will they stay the defender of X86 for many years to come?

StreamComputing.eu is not affiliated with ARM.

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I hope you enjoy it!

As there is a growing demand for information what all changed in the past few years. We don’t just have a computer with a screen, keyboard and mouse any more – but that is not all that changed. Since a lot happened around OpenCL, StreamComputing was in the middle of the revolutions and we are ready to share it with you.

For schools and universities we started StreamComputing-on-Tour to tell about OpenCL and the hardware that made it possible. This way students don’t leave to the market and finding out a different reality about the hi-tech industry. Presentations can be adapted for computer science, business school, economics, law and others. A good base for a seminar.

Both can be held in both Dutch and English. For booking and more information, see out contact-page, or call now +31645400456 or mail to vincent@streamcomputing.eu. To learn more about StreamComputing, read our brochure. For companies we already have trainings to explain your developers in one or two days how they can program in OpenCL, specifically adapted to your needs.