Targeting Heterogeneity with C++ AMP and PPL

Previously, I blogged about key trends in software development starting with concurrency/parallelism, and indeed today multi-core systems are everywhere. You can target multi-core systems from many mainstream programming languages, and with Visual Studio 2010 we delivered market leading tooling for parallel development and debugging. You can see my post on our concurrency enhancements to C++ for VS2010 and here for a walkthrough of our parallel debugging tools.

In the last few years, we have been seeing an additional trend of heterogeneous hardware where, for example, developers take advantage of the GPU for computational purposes for their data parallel algorithms. This has been successful in narrow verticals using niche programing models. Microsoft wants to bring to the mainstream the ability to write code that takes advantage of heterogeneous hardware like GPUs. So like we’ve done with multi-core before, we are bringing this ability to the next version of Visual Studio.

I’m excited to announce that we are introducing a new technology that helps C++ developers use the GPU for parallel programming. Today at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, we announced C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP). Additionally, I’m happy to say that we intend to make the C++ AMP specification an open specification.

By building on the Windows DirectX platform, our implementation of C++ AMP allows you to target hardware from all the major hardware vendors. We expect that it will be part of the next Visual C++ compiler and fully integrated in the next release of Visual Studio experience.

In addition, there is more work that we are doing on parallel computing. We also announced new enhancements to the next version of Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) and the C++ Concurrency Runtime. You can find easy-to-use C++ templates and runtime support to express algorithms for your domain expertise which scale on any provided hardware with PPL, Agent and the C++ Concurrency Runtime. With C++ AMP and PPL, we aim to make the next version of Visual Studio the most productive environment for targeting heterogeneous hardware available.

We will be making the session recording from Herb Sutter’s keynote session and Daniel Moth’s break-out session from the AMD Fusion conference available shortly. Please check the Visual C++ Team Blog or Channel 9 for those videos.

Namaste!