Aparapi - Accessing the Power of the GPU from Java

Gary Frost from AMD presented the Aparapi library to the Java Users Group last Tuesday, Nov 8th, 2011. The Aparapi library makes it easy to write parallel java programs on the GPU using OpenCL. Gary has done some very impressive work with Aparapi. Before Aparapi programmers had to code large blocks of repetitive boilerplate code to get their algorithms to be executed on the GPU. Aparapi does that for us automatically.
If a GPU is not present Aparapi will use separate threads to enhance performance.
Gary showed an example of the nbody problem where two galaxies collide to demonstrate the power of the GPU.
Some of the performance hit of transferring data to and from the GPU and the CPU should vanish when AMD's fusion chip, which has the GPU and CPU on the same chip, becomes widely used.
Gary mentioned that we are entering a world of throwaway CPU power. He gave the example of parsing an XML file by dividing it into two parts. One thread would parse the first section, but the second part of the file might depend on the 67 states that the first part might be ending in. The solution is to have the CPU/GPU parse the second half in all 67 possibilities, so that when the first part is done the second part will already be finished.