Parallel Programming Tutorials

Just had a look at the Parallel Programming Tutorial Series at multicoreinfo.com and it looks really good.

I'm a newbie at OpenCL. But then isn't everyone?

What I'm discovering is that the tricky part is the algorithms. In my twenty years of experience as an IT Professional, I've hardly ever had to deal with something that looked like a real algorithm. Almost everything in Java land had already been written. All you needed to do was to call whatever the API was.

In parallel computing and therefore, in OpenCL, algorithms are the core of what you do. Setting up your contexts, kernels, read and write buffers, etc., all that stuff is the easy bit.

My impression is that writing the kernel algorithms is the key skill. My guess is that if you can master a fundamental suite of parallel computing algorithms - in the same way that with Java you master common design patterns - then you will be golden.

If this is indeed the case, my hope would be that these fundamental algorithms can be applied to solve most of the common parallel computing problems.

But that's a lot of hoping and guessing. Let's see how it goes.

Here's some new stuff I just found on the NVIDIA site. There's PDFs and WMV movie files for older web seminars and you can register for forthcoming events.

GPU Computing Online Seminars

More tutorials and resources to follow when I get a mo...