The Foundry and Blink

An article at CGSociety talks to the guys at The Foundry to discuss the new task-level parallelism they’ve exploited in the new Nuke framework named ‘BLINK’.  Built by their HPC team Bruno Nicoletti and Jay Cornwall, they’ve been able to boost performance to process SD Footage at 200fps.

The Central Processing Unit in your desktop or laptop isn’t the only processing device. The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was designed with fast processing and rendering of the 2D and 3D graphics in mind. They were hard-wired to perform common graphics operations. Now, these are changing. First was the introduction of the OpenGL programming language. The NVIDIA released the CUDA language, which gave programmers access to the massive computing resources inside their GPUs. Even though writing code for the CPU is easier, the sheer number of simultaneous actions a GPU can do makes it a much more attractive option. It is quite possible to win ten-fold to 100-fold speed increases in a GPU over an equivalent generation CPU.

via CGSociety – The Foundry – Blink.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.