GPGPU with JOGL part 1.

Well I've started tinkering with the GPGPU concept that I mentioned in an earlier post. I've landed on JOGL as it seems to provide me with all the basic functionality that I am going to need and is reasonably cross-platform.

I need to be able to bind a texture (representing an input array of data) into a buffer against which I will run a shader program (the function that I want to perform on the data) and place the outcome of the shader program into a buffer from which I can extract the output array.

I'm struggling with a few handicaps -

• I'm using my PowerBook for this and support for OSX by JOGL is still a bit flakey.
• I've never programmed using GL APIs before so I'm having to learn them from scratch.
• Once I've grasped enought of the APIs, I still have to master at least one shader language.

It's certainly a fun learning curve.

I'm going to struggle on and hopefully I'll have a bitonic sort algorithm implemented before too long.