The MOSIX group announces the release of the MOSIX Virtual OpenCL (VCL) cluster platform version 1.0, which allows OpenCL applications to transparently utilize many GPU devices in clusters.

The official launch of Kanzi® UI Solution will be announced at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV. Kanzi® is the platform and operating system agnostic and requires only OpenGL ES 1.x or 2.0. Kanzi® offers a perfect solution for device manufacturers as it doesn’t cause the lock-in effect for specific platform or OS version but scales flexibly to any platform variant that supports OpenGL ES. Kanzi® users have a better influence and more freedom with decisions as they can use any 3D modeling tool supporting COLLADA® in order to create 3D objects and effects to user interfaces.

The Immersive Education Initiative unveiled iED 3D/VR™, the open and royalty-free cross-platform 3D/VR mesh file format that enables 3D and virtual reality (3D/VR) content to be created once and experienced across a range of virtual worlds, games, simulators and mixed/augmented reality applications. The culmination of over 2 years of work conducted through the Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG), iED 3D/VR is aligned with the COLLADA™ standard and supported by official iED virtual world platforms realXtend, Open Wonderland, Open Simulator (“OpenSim”) and Open Cobalt in addition to the candidate iED platform Sirikata.

Euro-Par is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel and distributed computing. Euro-Par focuses on all aspects of hardware, software, algorithms and applications in this field. A call for papers has been put out with a deadline of January 24 2011 for abstracts and January 31 2011 for the full paper.

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.

Vivante Corporation today announces the company has marked four major corporate milestones in 2010. The product milestones include a cumulative 40 companies licensing Vivante GPU cores; and multiple customers having integrated Vivante’s industry leading multicore GPUs into semiconductor products launching in 2011. “The industry’s standardization on OpenGL ES 2.0 in application content, as well as the web infrastructure provided by WebGL, Adobe AIR/Flash and HTML5 is driving healthy growth in demand for both our highest performance multicore and established single core GPUs,” said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante.

WebGL is now enabled by default in the latest FireFox Beta 8 browser. Principal Firefox Engineer Vlad Vukicevic commented on his blog “3-D games, interactive product displays, scientific and medical visualization, shared virtual environments, and 3-D content creation all become possible on the web.” Unlike desktop or mobile OpenGL development, it’s very easy to get started with WebGL. Some simple HTML and JS content lets you immediately start writing WebGL code. Firefox 4 Beta is available here.

The Khronos Group just wrapped up another DevU, this time in Seoul. Presentations slides from all the sessions are now online. Some of the Khronos APIs covered at this DevU were OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenGL SC, OpenVG and OpenMAX and OpenSL ES by AMD, ARM, DMP, DrawElements, HUONE, NVIDIA, Rightware and Samsung and Takumi. A complete schedule of events is available in our event archives.

OzViz 2010 OpenCL is a yearly one-day intensive course that covers both a general introduction as well as more advanced topics showcasing OpenCL as a technology platform. Speakers from both industry and academia discussed a range of subjects, including core fundamentals, hardware architectures, parallel programming, as well as workload scheduling and device specific optimizations. All course material is now available online for download.

Derek Gerstmann, University of Western Australia and Justin Hensley, AMD presented the course “OpenCL by Example” at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010. All course notes and supplementary materials are now available online for download. The course presenters are experts on general-purpose GPU computation and advanced rendering from academia and industry, and have presented papers and tutorials on the topic at SIGGRAPH, Graphics Hardware, Supercomputing, and elsewhere. This course demonstrates how to combine traditional rendering APIs with advanced parallel computation using OpenCL (Open Computing Language), a cross-platform API for programming parallel systems such as GPUs.

Google has taken the first step in getting wide spread public acceptance of WebGL by shipping their Chrome browser with WebGL turned on by default. To show you some of the possibilities of WebGL, Google labs also launched a Google Earth for the human body, dubbed Body Browser. There are other WebGL demos available from Google and on the official WebGL website.

The latest version of Google’s mobile OS, Android 2.3 Gingerbread has arrived on the scene with a few significant additions. Android is one of the first mobile devices to offer a software implementation of the Khronos Groups OpenSL ES™ API and EGL library. OpenSL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems and EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs and the underlying native platform window system.

In June 2011, developers, academics, industry leaders, and emerging innovators will convene in Bellevue, Washington at the inaugural AMD Fusion Developer Summit to learn about the AMD Fusion APU and the potential market opportunities it presents. AMD invites pioneers in heterogeneous computing to share their work and research findings in the form of presentations, technical papers, or reports with this influential community. Deadline for submissions is February 4th 2011.

The Khronos Group is hosting a Khronos Developer University co-located with SIGGRAPH Asia. Numerous Khronos members have joined together with each member taking a demonstration suite to create a large number of exciting demos in the Khronos Pavilion on the SIGGRAPH trade show floor. On December 17th Rightware is sponsoring a Beer and Demo Social. Complete dates, and schedules are available on the Khronos website. The Khronos Group has just wrapped up very successful events in Beijing and Tokyo.

An amazing showcase of WebGL in the scientific community. Using earth imagery and data from NASA with earthquake data from the U.S. Geological Survey, Dean McNamee and Marcin Ignac have created a must see visualization of earthquakes over the past 30 years.