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→Summary of Talk
==Summary of Talk==
This talk was about OpenCL, the parallel programming framework. The talk wasn't about what OpenCL is however, or what it can do, but why we should care about OpenCL as programmers. He talked about how the role of OpenCL is to build high level abstractions that are useful for your purposes. Because of this, we don't know what all of the different kinds of libraries are going to be. So we would want to enable an ecosystem for this sort of stuff. He talks a little bit about how that were are enfettering into an interesting situation when writing programs, where we use many different things made by many different people to achieve whatever are actual program purpose. With OpenCL, it is currently built for a very specific purpose right now, for general purpose computing. But he believes that it can be much more than that.
The current main problem with OpenCL is that it is changing with every release. Because of this, there is currently no stable API for OpenCL. You can't even link a version 1.1 library with a version 1.0 program. He wants to be able to future proof programs, meaning that we don't have to rewrite the same program for each no version release. To achieve this, he wants the software community to be as open as possible, to all work together so we don't have to work as hard individually when someone else makes a new version. This would greatly improve program portability. However, there's no parallel model of computation yet, it is very difficult to find something like a time complexity for parallel algorithms. There is also the notion if parallel algorithms even exist. He closes by saying that OpenCL isn't perfect, but we need to acknowledge that we are at the beginning of parallel programming abstractions, so we need to work together to set a proper foundation for it.
==Speakers View on Open Source==
Adrien is an advocate for open source software. He is very highly against software patents, and doesn't like the idea that someone can own the concept of something like the for loop. He is planning on moving to New Zealand to start an open source company which develops software for high performance computing. He believes that New Zealand will be the next Silicon Valley, as there are no software patents in New Zealand and thinks that many developers will flood over there. He did kind of jokingly say though that as much as he loves open source, he also loves to eat. He doesn't seem to keen on the kind of cash flow that open source software has been providing for him.
