The OpenCL working group, formed under the auspices of the Khronos Group to implement Apple's proposed Open Computing Language, has nailed down a complete specification for OpenCL in just six months. The announcement of the completion of the spec came at this year's Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas, this past Monday.

OpenCL was proposed so that programmers could write software in a way that would allow computing tasks to be best handled by whatever hardware resources are available to a given machine. In many of today's computers, that means multiple multicore processors, as well as multicore graphics processors, and sometimes specialized DSPs or other processors. "Highly-accelerated parallel computation across GPUs and CPUs is essential to many emerging rich consumer applications that will transform the computing experience of diverse users," said Khronos Group president Neil Trevett at the time the working group was formed.

In addition to Trevett, who also works for NVIDIA, Intel's Tim Mattson and AMD's Ben Gaster where on hand to present details of the group's work. But it wasn't easy to meet the tight deadline Apple set to include the technology in the next release of Mac OS X, which may ship as early as the first quarter next year. "If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it's quite normal for a standard to take five years or more," Trevett told Macworld. "You actually have to really push to get it down to 18 months. Our record was 12 months up to now; we've done this one in six."

"[W]e have, you know, divorced our families, we've had two phone meetings a week, face-to-face meetings and I can't count how many hours I've spent," said Mattson. "I'm just almost dead, I'm so exhausted. So, I'm really proud of what we pulled off."

But the work isn't done just yet. Though OpenCL has been defined from a technical standpoint, the spec still has to be vetted by all 20 of the companies involved in the working group, ensuring there are no problems with trademarks, copyrights, patents, or other issues. Until that time, the working group cannot release the specs publicly or give any demos.

However, Mac users may be the first to get to see the effects of OpenCL with the release of Snow Leopard. "If Apple ends up following through on the plans they stated on building this specification into Snow Leopard, I think you could see opportunity for imaging applications vendors, video application vendors to tap into the goodness of GPU hardware," Trevett told Macworld. "Everyone has a supercomputer locked away in their Mac, but it's hard to get at it. And OpenCL will unlock the potential of that supercomputer."

"The whole point of OpenCL is that it really doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is," Trevett said. "If it's programmable, OpenCL will let you tap into it."