Brook

A brook is a small stream. The word may also refer to:

People

Places

Other uses

See also

Brook (surname)

Brook is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

BrookGPU

The Brook programming language and its implementation BrookGPU were an early and influential attempt to enable general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Brook, developed at Stanford University graphics group, was a compiler and runtime implementation of a stream programming language targeting modern graphics hardware, to be used for program highly parallel GPUs such as those found on ATI or Nvidia graphics cards.

BrookGPU compiled programs written using the Brook stream programming language, which is a variant of ANSI C. It could use OpenGL v1.3+, DirectX v9+ or AMD's Close to Metal for the computational backend and ran on both Microsoft Windows and Linux . It could also simulate a virtual graphics card by itself via a special CPU backend for debugging Brook purposes.

Status

Brook has been in beta for a long time. The last major beta release (v0.4) was in October 2004 but renewed development began and stopped again in November 2007 with a v0.5 beta 1 release.

The new features of v0.5 include a much upgraded and faster OpenGL backend which uses framebuffer objects instead of PBuffers and harmonised the code around standard OpenGL interfaces instead of using proprietary vendor extensions. GLSL support was added which brings all the functionality (complex branching and loops) previously only supported by DirectX 9 to OpenGL. In particular, this means that Brook is now just as capable on Linux as Windows.