Announcement of C ++ AMP - an open platform for building heterogeneous (GPU + CPU) C ++ applications

Hi, Hub users! Now I’m in Bellevue, USA, at the AMD Fusion 11 Developer Summit conference. I will write about impressions about the city and the conference later when I summarize all the accumulated materials. In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about the important announcement that was made today during the plenary report of Microsoft.

Microsoft presented its vision of developing applications for working in a heterogeneous environment using all the capabilities of multi-core processors and GPUs. A new platform was introduced that will become part of the next version of Visual Studio.
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The new platform is called C ++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism or C ++ AMP. The objectives of this platform are as follows: to enable the use of the advantages of parallel computing and the GPU simultaneously in C ++, just as today these advantages are used in C (or its similarity) in different development platforms: OpenCL, CUDA, DirectCompute.

The plenary report clearly demonstrated the use of a new platform for developing applications that require high computing power. So with the help of the features that C ++ AMP has achieved, excellent results were achieved in using existing GPUs and multicore CPUs even on a netbook, which was able to issue dozens of gigaflops to solve the demonstration problem of calculating the interaction of many bodies in space. A more powerful system with two GPUs allowed using the same code for hundreds of gigaflops of resources (the result of 800+ gigaflops was demonstrated).

Microsoft representatives particularly emphasize the prospects for this platform for developing cloud computing in the future. The platform was created with the expectation that soon we will be able to use hundreds of millions of GPU computing modules in our applications via cloud services. C ++ AMP will allow you to write such code today, so that tomorrow it will work on similar capacities.

An important part of the C ++ AMP announcement was the announcement by Microsoft that the new platform would be released under an open specification, so any company or developer for any of the platforms can create it! Microsoft also announced that it intends to help third-party implementations of the new platform and cited the example of cooperation with AMD in this matter.

Some details about the new platform can be found now on the developer blog at www.danielmoth.com/Blog/C-Accelerated-Massive-Parallelism.aspx .

In addition, Microsoft today announced that in the next version of Visual Studio, in addition to supporting C ++ AMP, support for debugging and profiling code on the GPU will be added!

Today, this is all the news from the AMD Fusion 11 conference, later I will write a detailed review of the event with announcements of companies and my impressions.