Learn and share ideas at the Perth GPU Users group. Founded to bring together GPU users from all fields and experience levels in Western Australia. Topics of discussion include general GPU computing, GPGPU, CUDA, OpenCL, OpenGL, DirectCompute, DirectX and related technologies. The next meetup is tentatively scheduled for June 23rd at the ground Floor Physics Building, University of Western Australia (Crawley Campus) 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA. 5:30pm - 7pm. You can find additional Khronos API related events and meet-ups on the Khronos Group events page.

WebGL Camp at Wallenberg Hall, Stanford University on June 25th 2010, has announced the speaker lineup, and what a lineup it is. Mark Barnes, Biodroid Productions and Work Group Chair for COLLADA will focus on the importance and value of content and how to achieve it with COLLADA. Along with Mark there will be: Peterson Trethewey, O3D; Paul Brunt, GLGE; Giles Thomas, Learning WebGL; Daniel Horn, Sirikata; Daniel B. Miller, Katalabs; Trevor Smith, Spaciblō; Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Stanford Computer Science; Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla Firefox; Alan Chaney, Mechnicality and Google Chrome 3D Team.

Erik Rainey has released a series of utilities aimed at making OpenCL easier to use under the Apache 2.0 License. The environment includes: clCompiler which generates both binary outputs and precompiled headers which can be used in conjunction with clEnvironment; clQuery allows you to print all known information about a OpenCL data type. clPid, clYUV and clImgFilter are examples of how to use the utilities to create a compile time kernel make it a dependency in you makefiles and then use the clEnvironment to call your kernel. You can download the OpenCL Environment from github.

The first WebGL Camp is quickly approaching on June 25th, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. According to Learning WebGL the following will be speaking at the camp: Vladimir Vukićević, the originator of Canvas3D and WebGL, Trevor Smith of Spaciblo, and Google’s Peterson Trethewey (on O3D and WebGL).

Digital Media professionals has announced that the DMP 3D Graphics IP “PICA200” has been adopted by Nintendo’s new portable game machine “Nintendo 3DS.” The PICA200 chip is fully compliant with OpenGL ES 1.1.

CMSoft brings a versatile and useful tool, Marching Cubes, adapted to GPU acceleration using OpenCL. Sample source code is available. Marching Cubes is an algorithm used in a very wide range of applications, including Medical visualizations such as CT and MRI scan images; Special 3D effects and 3D modelling of metaballs or metasurfaces: Analysis of oil reservoirs in the oil and gas industry and Reconstitution of surfaces whose data has been acquired through seismic methods.

The Khronos Group will be at SIGGRAPH 2010 this year in Los Angeles with their own booth. Visit Khronos at booth # 1201 and pickup a free laminated reference card for OpenCL and OpenGL as well as see some amazing demonstrations from Imagination Technologies, Rightware, HUONE, Vivante and DMP. As well, there will be a number of BOFs this year including the much anticipated OpenGL BOF, COLLADA, OpenCL, Mobile API and new this year, the WebGL BOF. Be sure not to miss out by registering for your spot today. Space is limited so please don’t wait til the last minute. Complete details on all the events at SIGGRAPH that Khronos will be a part of are available online.

If you ever wanted to be a tank operator, now’s your chance. Take the Tron tank for a spin over at SceneJS. The source code is also available. The example loads the tank from three seperate “assets” defined within the same COLLADA file, then wraps each within modelling transforms that are dynamically configured with parameters generated from mouse input.

AECOLLADA is a plugin for After Effects CS3/CS4 and CS5 designed to read and write motion data in the Collada 1.4.1 file format. Its main purpose is to share animation data between After Effects and general 3D production software. The plugin has been tested with Collada files generated from 3DSMax, Daz Studio, Lightwave3D, Maya and trueSpace.

The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.1 specification, the latest version of the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. OpenCL 1.1 adds significant functionality for enhanced parallel programming flexibility, functionality and performance including:

• New data types including 3-component vectors and additional image formats;
• Handling commands from multiple hosts and processing buffers across multiple devices;
• Operations on regions of a buffer including read, write and copy of 1D, 2D or 3D rectangular regions;
• Enhanced use of events to drive and control command execution;
• Additional OpenCL C built-in functions such as integer clamp, shuffle and asynchronous strided copies;
• Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL and OpenGL events.

ZiiLABS showcased its latest OpenCL technology to partners visiting the Computex show. ‘OpenCL enables developers to unlock the full potential of our StemCell Computing array to deliver new levels of performance across a broad range of applications.’ said Tim Lewis, director of marketing of ZiiLABS. ‘The OpenCL based ray-tracing and video filter demos provide just a glimpse at the floating-point performance and flexibility that developers can exploit on ZMS-based platforms and products.’ ZiiLABS is currently inviting developers with innovative ideas to use OpenCL for consumer class handheld and connected platforms to join an OpenCL Early Access Program that will provide selected partners an early release of the OpenCL SDK* for ZMS processors. Developers wishing to apply should visit the ZiiLabs website.

Code Project has posted Part 1 on learning the basics of how to install and use OpenCL with Java to unleash the power of your GPU.

Differential equations are crucial to all exact sciences, such as engineering, physics, chemistry and even economics. There packages use GPUs to compute solutions to problems such as solving linear systems and computing FFT. This work covers an easy-to-use ordinary differential equation system solver for scientific applications and games. Examples include calculating trajectories and collision of particles in game engines, electron-proton interactions, gravitational calculations, dynamic modeling of deformable bodies and many more.

The Vienna Computing Library (ViennaCL) is a scientific computing library written in C++ and based on OpenCL. It allows simple, high-level access to the vast computing ressources available on parallel architectures such as GPUs and is primarily focused on common linear algebra operations (BLAS level 1 and 2) and the solution of large systems of equations by means of iterative methods.

Although not specifically related to a Khronos API, I figured this a fun way to start the week. At walkingrandomly.com, the author gives a short summary of The Linpack benchmarks used to benchmark Super Computers, and how he benchmarked his Android phone. So, just how many times faster is the latest Android phone when compared to a 1979 1 CPU Cray computer? Check out the article for the answer.