Few months ago I noticed an interesting move in the niche realm of specialized programming environments: Peakstream (formerly at www.peakstreaminc.com) was being acquired by Google, see
Implications could be multifold, in the brave new world of multicore and heterogeneous processors when HPC-related techniques are becoming more and more relevant for new enterprise applications.Peakstream "language" clearly has (had?) roots into the work of Pat Hanrahan's group at Stanford producing the Brook streaming language.
Similar to Peakstream programming model, RapidMind (www.rapidmind.net) offers a vector-oriented, data-parallel unified view targeting difficult beasts such as Cell BE, GPGPU and FP accelerators, as well as standard multicores. See Cure for the Multicore Blues, IEEE Spectrum (Jan 2007). Also in this case, this product is the results of an academic project by Michael McCool's group at the Canadian University of Waterloo producing Sh.
Among FP accelerator solutions, Clearspeed offers yet another very similar programming model. Their hardware is already double precision (while at present both Cell BE and GPUs are native single precision only) and much less power hungry, therefore more easily integrated in large cluster architectures, however peak performances are somewhat lagging behind.
