A group of developers from Stanford University released their BrookGPU – a compiler and runtime system that provides an easy, C-like programming environment for today’s GPUs. According to this report from Slashdot, a shader program running on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU achieves over 20GFLOPS, roughly equivalent to a 10GHz Intel Pentium 4. A real powerhouse that is available now, has some issues with programming, as GPU programming is not a trivial task. BrookGPU adds simple data parallel language additions to C which allow programmers to specify certain parts of their code to run on the GPU. The compiler and runtime takes care of the rest.
