Movimientos de mercado: Google y GPUs

Google Acquires PeakStream

June 6 -- On Tuesday Google Inc. said it has acquired PeakStream, a startup company that provides a software development platform for multicore programming on high performance computing systems. No details were provided about the terms of the acquisition.

PeakStream's software platform is designed to make it easy for HPC developers to take advantage of industry-standard multicore architectures such as the x86, GPUs, and the Cell BE processor. The platform uses a stream programming model, a data parallel approach designed for the distributed, hierarchical memories of the new generation of multicore processors. RapidMind Inc., another startup, has developed a similar software platform that targets the same developer community.

PeakStream's technology is derived from work done at Stanford University. Company co-founder and chief scientist Pat Hanrahan began investigating stream programming while he was a Stanford professor. The company's other co-founder and CTO, Matt Papakipos, was a member of the Graphic Processing Unit processor architecture group at NVIDIA, where he was responsible for developing several core architectural components of NVIDIA's GeForce GPU.

Google's interest in PeakStream is not immediately apparent. Although the search engine giant maintains an enormous grid of commodity servers around the world, Google currently uses standard development platforms to develop and maintain its own software.