[Haskell-cafe] ANN: OpenCLRaw 1.0.1000

[Jeff Heard]

All, I've released a raw binding to the OpenCL platform on Hackage.
The main differences between it and the C bindings are that constants
have been replaced by newtypes for type safety reasons, void-essential
functions that return a token errorcode return a Maybe ErrorCode, and
functions that return a handle/ptr and return an error-code through an
out-parameter return instead an Either ErrorCode a.  Modules are
grouped roughly by the section in which they appear in the standard.

I'm working on an OpenCL binding that is a little more "cooked" as
well as a high-level OpenCL binding.

OpenCL is a platform for single-host heterogenous, data-parallel
computing that follows roughly the OpenGL and OpenAL conventions for
how the library is architected.  It will be available by default in
the next version of Apple's OS-X, and there are drivers for AMD
Opteron/Athlons and nVidia CUDA-based graphics cards.

The basic procedure behind running an OpenCL program is:

1. get a list of platforms
2. choose a device on the platform that fits  your needs
3. create a context for the platform and the device
4. compile a program and "kernels" written in OpenCL/C
5. create memory buffer objects.
6. execute kernels on the memory buffer objects.
7. rinse hands, repeat.

Obviously this is not very functional, but we can't get there without
a raw binding.   Data Parallel computing is somewhere Haskell is
excelling; hopefully this will generate some interest in creating a
DPH binding to OpenCL's C99-based language, OpenCL/C.