Intel Goes Giddy-up on GPUs

Parallel computing is not just about CPUs, anymore. Think GPUs and (perhaps more importantly) the dev tools to utilize them. From a piece by Michael Feldman at HPCwire:

"With the advent of general-purpose GPUs, the Cell BE processor, and the upcoming Larrabee chip from Intel, data parallel computing has become the hot new supermodel in HPC. And even though NVIDIA took the lead in this area with its CUDA development environment, Intel has been busy working on Ct, its own data parallel computing environment." ...

"Ct is a high-level software environment that applies data parallelism to current multicore and future manycore architectures. ... Ct allows scientists and mathematicians to construct algorithms in familiar-looking algebraic notation. Best of all, the programmer does not need to be concerned with mapping data structures and operations onto cores or vector units; Ct's high level of abstraction performs the mappings transparently. 'The two big challenges in parallel computing is getting it correct and getting it to scale, and Ct directly takes aim at both' ..."

Ct stands for C/C++ for throughput computing.