Download Our Graphics Environment

Our Graphics Environment
Hardware
• CPU
• Modern CPUs are multicore processors that support programs that can run at
the same time as other programs
• The level of parallelism (as enabled by the number of CPU cores) is relatively
low
• GPU—massively parallel, set up for high-speed graphics
• All modern high-performance graphics systems use massively parallel
GPUs
• How do the CPU and GPU communicate? Slow data bus
Programing on the CPU
• We will use Java
• High-level language
• Interpreter translates our Java code to object code (check)
• Java Run-time Environment (JRE) takes the object code and translates it to
CPU readable machine language
• Need a graphic
Programming on the GPU
• We can only get to the GPU through the CPU
• We will write programs in Java that run on the CPU that launch
programs that run on the GPU
• We will call the CPU the ‘client side’ and the GPU the ‘server side’
• Our client-side Java programs will contain character strings that represent
relatively short OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) programs
• The GLSL programs will be compiled and linked by built-in OpenGL tools on
the client side but…
• They will run on the GPU (the server-side)
• Wait! Don’t run away screaming…
Our programming environment
• Client side
• Java (language), Eclipse (IDE), JOGL (Java wrapper for OpenGL libraries)
• Server side
• GLSL (the OpenGL shading languages)
• Can you do this programming in other environments? Absolutely
• C and C++ are the most common client side programming languages (I use
C++)
• HLSL (high-level shading language) is used extensively by programmers
preferring to use the Microsoft DirectX graphics library over OpenGL
What if you don’t want to do graphics?
• GPUs can be used for general purpose programming (like a CPU)
• Some languages that are good for this include
• CUDA (NVIDIA)
• OpenCL (from the folks who gave you OpenGL)
• Probably many others