Re: [Gimp-developer] Parallelization project (for students)

[Jon Nordby <jononor gmail com>]

On 8 July 2013 11:59, Thomas Karcher (IPD) <thomas karcher kit edu> wrote:

> Dear GIMP developers,
>
> we're a team of teaching assistants at KIT Karlsruhe. We'd like to offer
> a hands-on parallelization course for master students of computer
> science in the upcoming semester, and our idea is to teach
> parallelization while actually parallelizing "real" software.
>
> For this, we're looking for a suitable project - this is where GIMP
> comes in: We're hoping that GIMP includes an image filter or some other
> component that is more or less compute-intense and worth parallelizing.
> We aspire to provide a contribution to GIMP in form of a working patch
> that incorporates the parallelization we worked out.
>
> Do you see a component in GIMP that would be suitable for us _and_ you?
> (I am asking you because a) I am lazy and b) as a non-GIMP-developer, I
> can't possibly have the insight you have or even remotely guess which
> component might be suitable for us _and_ of use to you once it's
> parallelized.)

Hi Thomas,

first I'd like to commend you on chosing to work on real, useful, software
while teaching.

GIMP is moving towards using GEGL as its image processing engine. This
means using GEGL operations, either to directly replace existing image
processing code, or to use operations as part of a GIMP plugin or tool (or
as a minimum work on GeglBuffers).
http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Hacking:Porting_filters_to_GEGL

GEGL uses OpenCL to provide parallelizated operations, grep for gegl-cl.h
in the source tree for examples.

A Google Summer of Code project is also taking place for porting filters
from GIMP to GEGL. This work is mentored by Victor Oliviera (victorm) and
done by Carlos Zubieta (zurwolf) , so you should probably check in with
them. http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Hacking:GSoC/2013/Ideas

So if working with OpenCL is not a problem, there is plenty of suitable
work. The nice thing about operations for student work is that they are
self-contained and can be understood quite easily in isolation.

PS:
1) wiki pages may be out of date
2) most devs prefer IRC over email, so get on #gimp and #gegl on GimpNet
3) ask if you get stuck


-- 
Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com