Last week myself and a group of friends took a winter camping trip up to the Lake District. An odd decision, it could be argued, seen as the region has recently seen both some of its worst flooding and coldest winters in recent years. Nonethless, equipped with ice axe, crampons and a generous supply of Kendal Mint Cake we set out to climb Scafell.
Update – source code now available
Microsoft have recently released a beta of Silverlight 4, which has limited support for native interoperation using COM. Potentially, this example could be applied to any number of native interop scenarios, however for this example I have chosen to use Nvidia’s CUDA technology.
Disclaimer : This is an example of what can be done, not necessarily, and in all likelihood, an example of how it should be done.
Up until around 2001 PC graphics cards, though powerful, implemented a fixed function pipeline that limited use to whatever was exposed by the APIs, usually Direct3D or OpenGL. The addition of a programmable pixel pipeline led to the use of graphics cards for more general computation tasks; at first using shaders directly, followed by higher level GPU specific programming languages, such as Brook, SH, and later NVidia’s CUDA. Most of this work was, and is, documented by the GPGPU group. NVIDIA’s website shows CUDA being used in a wide variety of applications but in practice it is best employed in so called “embarassingly parallel” problems.
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I sometimes find it useful to search MSDN directly using Google, so I wrote a search plugin using OpenSearch to make this easier. Firefox should discover the search plugin automatically – it should appear in the search drop down at the top right. Otherwise, you can just install the plugin directly. For more details, see Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox.
