Edit (27 May 2010): until now Oracle/SUN has not shown anything that would validate this rumour, and the job-posting is not there anymore. Follow us on Twitter to be the first to know if Oracle/SUN will have better support for GPGPU for Solaris and/or Java and/or its hardware.
—
Job Description: The Power to change your world begins with your work at Sun! This is a software staff engineering position requiring the ability to design, test, implement and maintain innovative and advanced graphics software. The person in this role is expected to identify areas for improvement and modification of Sun’s platform products and contribute to Sun’s overall product strategy. This person will work closely with others within the team and, as required, across teams to accomplish project objectives. May assume a leadership role in projects, including such activities as leading projects, participator in product planning and technology evaluation and related activities. May use technical leadership and influence to negotiate product design features or applications, both internally, and with open source groups as needed. Requirements: \* Excellent problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills
* Excellent knowledge of the C/C++ and Java programming languages
* Thorough working knowledge of 3D graphics, GPU architecture, and
3D APIs, such as OpenGL & Direct3D
* Thorough working knowledge of shader-level languages such as
GLSL, HLSL, and/or Cg
* Experience designing cross-platform, public APIs for developers
(Windows/MacOS/Linux)
* Experience with multi-threaded programming and debugging techniques
* Experience with operating systems level engineering
* Experience with performance profiling, analysis, and optimization Education and Experience: Univ degree in computer sciene or engineering plus 5 years direct experience In other words, a specialist in everything graphics-cards and Java, in a completely new area. Since OpenGL is a already known area not needing such a specialist for, there is a very good chance it will target OpenCL. A good choice.
Sun has all reasons to jump the train with Java, since Microsoft is already integrating loads of OpenCL-tools into its Visual Studio product (created by AMD and nVidia). Java has still more than 3 times the market share than C#, but with this late jump the gap will be closer in favour of Microsoft. Remember C# can easily call C-functions (which is the language OpenCL is written in); Java has a far more difficult task when it comes to calling C-functions without hazards, which is sort of implemented here and here. If OpenCL would not be implemented by Java, C, C++ and C# will make a jump a hole in Java’s share.
Besides Java, also Sun’s super-multi-threaded Sparc-servers will be in trouble since the graphic-cards of nVidia and AMD are now serious competitors. There is no official support of Sparc-processors for OpenCL, wile AMD has included X86-support and IBM PowerPC-support (also working on Cell) a few months ago.
Then we have the databases Oracle and MySQL; Oracle depends on Java a lot. While we see experiments speeding up competitor PostgreSQL with GPU-power, Oracle might become the slow turtle in a GPU-ruled database-world. MySQL has the same development-speed and also “bleeding edge” releases, but Oracle might slow down its official support. Expect Microsoft to have SQL-server fully loaded in its next major release.
If Oracle/Sun jumped the train today, expect no OpenCL-products from Oracle/Sun before Q2-2011.