Geometric Algebra Computing for Heterogeneous Systems

Starting from the situation 15 years ago with a great gap between the low symbolic complexity on the one hand and the high numeric complexity of coding in Geometric Algebra on the other hand, this paper reviews some applications showing, that, in the meantime, this gap could be closed, especially for CPUs. Today, the use of Geometric Algebra in engineering applications relies heavily on the availability of software solutions for the new heterogeneous computing architectures. While most of the Geometric Algebra tools are restricted to CPU focused programming languages, in this paper, we introduce the new Gaalop (Geometric Algebra algorithms optimizer) Precompiler for heterogeneous systems (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, DSPs ...) based on the programming language C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) of the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation. As a proof-of-concept we present a raytracing application together with some computing details and first performance results