Presented by Michael Meeks, Collabor

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The story and status of how we re-factored the LibreOffice spreadsheet application to move calculations to the GPU using OpenCL.

Traditionally LibreOffice has had appallingly slow and miss-architected spreadsheet core. Come and hear how we re-designed it to take advantage of the major wins possible with both GPU and CPU parallelism to make it the world’s first OpenCL enabled spreadsheet, and hear of the terrible things that we had inside previously.

Hear about the structural challenges that OpenCL and the GPU bring and how they were solved by a combined Collabora, AMD and MultiCoreWare team, getting the underlying data structures right. Get a grasp of the challenges involved in loading and crunching large datasets in spreadsheet formats and the threading work we’ve done to improve that.

If there’s time, I’ll showcase some of the features we have in the latest LibreOffice 4.1 release, along with obvious areas of future work around OpenCL enablement.