SDNET – all about .NET and computing

It’s been again a long time since my last post.
Today I wanted to explore a little bit the realms of paralel processing. As I already stated in some previous posts, the current trend of going multicore is somewhat out of phase of the current programming techniques, meaning we have multicore but we rarely use it. Most applications available on the market are single core and some have just some modules optimized for multicore.
Suprisingly the most parallel applications nowadays are graphics processing. Latest generation GPU’s are actually multicore processors, but specialized for simple operations (thus very fast). For the general purpose software developer this processing powerhouse is out of reach due to the different programming model. What this means is that first of all there is a lack of higher level abstractions of the GPU and also there are limitations because of this specializations.
There are some API’s available from NVIDIA and AMD (read ATI) in the form of CUDA and STREAM, but for me, as a C# developer they are not attractive since they offer a C++ API.

Fortunately there is Microsoft Accelerator which you can get from here. This is a .Net abstraction over the GPU and allows for some basic computations to be forwarded to the GPU instead of the CPU. Naturally I wanted to explore a little bit and especially to do some tests. Below is my test example, some results and remarks.
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