AMD has posted a great Google Map showing Universities world-wide that offer OpenCL coursework.

The 36th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers confirms the rumored takeover of the top spot by the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).

The OpenCL supported Blender Compositor shows significant gains on OpenCL capable machines.

NVIDIA has brought the Fermi graphics architecture to the Mac with the launch of the Quadro 4000 for Mac. The workstation-class video supports the same features as its Windows counterpart and focuses heavily on general-purpose computing. OpenCL in Snow Leopard also gets a boost from this release and can greatly accelerate apps that are using NVIDIA’s own CUDA language as well, such as video processing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP hereafter), a world-class leader in 2D/3D graphics solutions, headquartered in Tokyo Japan, today announced that DMP has become a member of the Xilinx, Inc. Xilinx Alliance Program members make up a worldwide ecosystem of qualified companies that have a proven track record in delivering products and services built for Xilinx programmable logic technologies. DMP provide the competitive FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) solutions in aspects of system cost benefits and lowering design risks with its IP products tightly cooperating with Xilinx’s platforms.

Available at WhatIf.intel.com, this implementation delivers OpenCL 1.1 specification features optimized for Intel Core™ processors for developers desiring to explore CPU advantages found on many OpenCL workloads. Currently, Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems are supported. Intel OpenCL SDK is a full implementation of the OpenCL 1.1 specification, including all API’s and language features, and supports additional optional features and extensions such as: Out-of-order Execution model, Images support, Double precision floating point, OpenCL-OpenGL interoperability, and more. This SDK is not fully conformant yet.

This international meeting of experts provides a single forum for representatives of all standards bodies and the contributors to AR standards development processes to meet and discuss their activities and progress, and to advance new specifications more rapidly than is possible without face-to-face interactions. This meeting will be based on a mixture of submitted papers, invited talks and open format, group discussions. In order to inform discussions and to select speakers, participants are encouraged, but not required, to submit papers.

The Khronos Group did a great job in the last few years to once again prove that OpenGL is still in game and that it can become the ultimate graphics API of choice, if it is not that already. However, we must note that it is not quite yet true that OpenGL 4.1 is a superset of its competitor, DirectX 11. We still have some holes that still have to be filled and I think the ARB should not stop just there as there is much more potential in the current hardware architectures than that is currently exposed by any graphics API so establishing the future of OpenGL should start by going one step further than DX11. In this article I would like to present my vision of items of importance that should be included in the next revision of the specification and how I see the future of OpenGL.

AMD will be hosting a bunch of cool demo’s at their booth (#3119). Demo’s range from the latest 12-core AMD OpteronTM 6100 Series processor-based OEM servers to some new applications leveraging AMD graphics technology and OpenCL™.

ClanLib is a cross platform C++ toolkit library based around OpenGL. It’s primary focus is on games (free or commerical thanks to a BSD style license). Image, Sprite and Font drawing are optimised to give high frame rates by drawing in batches, reducing OpenGL state changes. If OpenGL v2.0 or above is not available, the library seamlessly provides OpenGL v1.3 or a high performance software renderer. Supports multiple windows with a full GUI framework for use in 2D or 3D applications. This latest version contains new examples demonstrating the ease of creating custom shaders. In addition, a HDR test has been updated to demonstrate using OpenGL floating point textures.

The Khronos Group congratulates ARM on the announcement of the Mali-T604 and its plan to support full profile OpenCL 1.1 on both ARMv7 CPUs and the GPU.

VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) allows Linux systems to offload portions of video decode to the GPU. The resulting video can be post-processed with OpenGL, CUDA, or both. Watch Stephen Warren from NVIDIA explain VDPAU and demonstrate OpenGL texturing of hardware-decoded video frames. Slides (PDF) are also available.

After the success of the first seven entries to the ShaderX book series, of GPU Pro and the soon to be released GPU Pro 2, we are looking for authors for GPU Pro 3. The upcoming book will cover advanced rendering techniques that run on the DirectX or OpenGL run-times, or any other run-time with any language available. It will include topics on: Geometry Manipulation; Rendering Techniques; Handheld Devices Programming; Effects in Image Space; Shadows; 3D Engine Design; Graphics Related Tools; Environmental Effects and a dedicated section on General Purpose GPU Programming that will cover CUDA, DirectCompute and OpenCL examples. Proposals are due by March 17th, 2011. Contact details, an example proposal, writing guidelines and a FAQ can be downloaded from gpupro3.blogspot.com.

After receiving feedback from AMD, G-Truc has written a follow-up article to his original post on the current status of OpenGL 4.1 drivers.

The nopper.tv website now contains one more OpenGL 3.3 and one OpenGL 4.0 example. The OpenGL 4.0 example is a simple tesselation implementation. There are now 13 different OpenGL source code examples available.