Brook (programming language)

BrookGPU

Operating system	Linux, Windows
Type	Compiler/runtime
License	BSD license (parts are under the GPL)
Website	http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/

The Brook programming language and its implementation BrookGPU were early and influential attempts to enable general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Brook, developed at Stanford University graphics group, was a compiler and runtime implementation of a stream programming language targeting modern, highly parallel GPUs such as those found on ATI or Nvidia graphics cards.

BrookGPU compiled programs written using the Brook stream programming language, which is a variant of ANSI C. It could target OpenGL v1.3+, DirectX v9+ or AMD's Close to Metal for the computational backend and ran on both Microsoft Windows and Linux. For debugging, BrookGPU could also simulate a virtual graphics card on the CPU.

Brook has been in beta for a long time. The last major beta release (v0.4) was in October 2004 but renewed development began and stopped again in November 2007 with a v0.5 beta 1 release.

The new features of v0.5 include a much upgraded and faster OpenGL backend which uses framebuffer objects instead of PBuffers and harmonised the code around standard OpenGL interfaces instead of using proprietary vendor extensions. GLSL support was added which brings all the functionality (complex branching and loops) previously only supported by DirectX 9 to OpenGL. In particular, this means that Brook is now just as capable on Linux as Windows.

Other improvements in the v0.5 series include multi-backend usage whereby different threads can run different Brook programs concurrently (thus maximising use of a multi-GPU setup) and SSE and OpenMP support for the CPU backend (this allows near maximal usage of modern CPUs).

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