Grand Central vs Parallel Extensions

Question

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?

Answer 1

Snow Leopard is now out of 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 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/

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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