LibreOffice Lands A Ton Of GPU OpenCL Functions

More than fifty commits pushed into the core code-base today for the LibreOffice open-source office suite work on support for "GPU Calc" to take advantage of OpenCL for various math spreadsheet calculations.

Earlier in the summer we heard about LibreOffice looking to take advantage of OpenCL for faster calculations, particularly for its spreadsheet component, Calc, and now some of this work is finally landing. AMD was trying to spearhead the OpenCL support in LibreOffice while the work to talk about today is coming out of MulticoreWare.

Among the functions that were implemented in OpenCL for offloading onto graphics processors from LibreOffice include PPMT (a financial payment on the principal equation), FISHERINV (the inverse of the Fisher transformation), FISHER (Fisher transformation), GAMMA (GAMMA function value), SLN (depreciation of an asset based upon straight-line depreciation), GAMMALN (natural logarithm of GAMMA), ACCRINTM (the accrued interest for a security that pays interest at maturity), GAUSS, COUPDAYBS, GEOMEAN, DOLLARDE (dollar fraction to dollar as a decimal number), DOLLARFR (dollar as a fraction), and numerous other functions have been implemented with OpenCL support.

As pointed out by my descriptions, most of the implemented functions in CL are around financial functionality that's supported by LibreOffice Calc and generally mirrored by what's available in Microsoft Office Excel. There's been more than 50 code commits today working to expand LibreOffice's OpenCL capabilities. OpenCL won't make much of a difference for users of simple spreadsheets, but it will be interesting to see how much of an advantage OpenCL can provide on GPUs for more intensive spreadsheet workloads.

With the work hitting the core Git code-base today, the OpenCL changes should be apart of the LibreOffice 4.2 release due out in late January or early February.