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867

answers:

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Does anyone know of any good websites on the upcoming "Grand Central" technology from Apple (in Snow Leopard) and how it compares to the Parallel Extensions (and the native parallel computing stuff) coming from Microsoft?

A: 

I haven't seen anything on "Grand Central" specifically, but there has been some discussion about the OpenCL standard over at GPGPU.org

mtnygard
A: 

I can't say anything about Grand Central but if you are looking for a technology/research group in which the MS stuff takes a bit from then I'd check out Cilk http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/ there is also a commercial version distributed by Cilk Arts http://www.cilk.com/

Granville Barnett
Thank you, but the MS stuff is really easy to find info on. I really wanted links on Grand Central so that I might do a comparative study on both. Turns out Apple (as usual) is rather secretive about this and anyone knowing anything won't disclose it (because of NDA...).
Mussnoon
NDA != DNA
Alex
A: 

Its a bit off topic - but what are you actually trying to achieve within your parallel environment ?

steve
+1  A: 

Grand Central is still under NDA from Apple, that's why it's so hard to find information on it as anyone publishing anything about it would be in violation.

The only reliable source of information on the technology I know of is ADC itself (http://developer.apple.com), but you'll need a paid membership to access it.

Roberto Teixeira
+7  A: 

Snow Leopard is now out of NDA:

GCD Conceptual Documentation
GCD API Reference

Frogblast
+1  A: 

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I was under the impression, that grand central dispatch was at the operating system level and parallel extensions is more like an add-on library. So if I interpret this correctly all applications running on OS X. will be sharing a thread pool while with parallel extensions each running application will have its own thread pool.

This suggests that Grand Central dispatch should be better at load-balancing.

Adam Smith