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Over the last few days, there have been various announcements by Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and all the usual suspects, of new or revamped tools to enable programmers to harness the multicore CPUs and GPUs that are now effectively mainstream hardware. There is clearly a yawning chasm between today's hardware systems and the use made of these by today's software systems. A gap that is likely to get bigger before it gets smaller. Hence the push by the hardware manufacturers to ensure there are good tools available. It is purely enlightened self-interest.
Why comment? It seems that unless you are using Visual Studio you do not get access to these tools. Now whilst Visual Studio is a very important “player in the game”, an increasing number of developers use Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Free BSD, etc. as their development platform. Moreover, Linux is the majority player in the “operating system for HPC” stakes. It seems a poor strategy therefore to treat these platforms as third-class citizens, or as in many cases simply ignore them – particularly bearing in mind that today's HPC application is tomorrow's mainstream application.
Then of course there are articles talking about how these tool manufacturers are “in talks with” you-know-who about operating system support and tool support, and your mind is drawn to “conspiracy theories” . . . is this just another aspect of the attack on alternative operating systems by a monopolist?