Grand Center vs. Parallel Extensions

Question

Does anyone know any good sites about Apple's upcoming "Grand Central" technology (at Snow Leopard) and how it compares with Microsoft's Parallel Extensions (and native parallel computing tools)?

Answer 1

Snow Leopard now exits the NDA:

GCD Conceptual Documentation
GCD API Reference

Answer 2

I can’t say anything about Grand Central, but if you are looking for a technology / research group in which MS stuff goes a bit, I would look Cilk http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/ there is also a commercial version distributed by Cilk Arts http://www.cilk.com/

Answer 3

Grand Central is still under Apple's NDA, so it’s so hard to find information about it, since anyone who posts anything about it will violate it.

The only reliable source of technology information that I know of is ADC itself ( http://developer.apple.com ), but you will need to access it.

Answer 4

Maybe I'm wrong, but I got the impression that the big central scheduling was at the operating system level, and parallel extensions are more like an additional library. Therefore, if I correctly interpret all applications running on OS X, I will share the thread pool, and with parallel extensions, each running application will have its own thread pool.

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

Answer 5

I didn’t see much at Grand Central, but there was some discussion of the OpenCL standard at GPGPU.org