AMD has released its Stream SDK for Linux a few days ago. Called Stream SDK 1.01 Beta, it brings Brook+ and CAL to those of you that are using ATI/AMD video cards. For the time being, it only supports Red Hat Linux 5.1 and SUSE Enterprise Server SP1, on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Stream computing is a technology that can harness the processing power of GPUs for high-performance, data-intensive computing in a wide range of scientific, business and normal applications, providing the ability to process large amounts of data in a reduced amount of time. The Stream SDK contains AMD CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer) and Brook+, an extension of Stanford's Brook language. CUDA, the Compute Unified Device Architecture, is NVidia's technology that competes with Stream – it has been supported on Linux for some time. Folding@Home is one of the most important scientific projects that are taking advantage of AMD graphic processors with Stream. The Stanford University is using Folding@Home for disease research.

The SDK is available as a 12 MB zip file for both architectures and, inside the archive, there are separate binaries for CAL and Brook+. If you want to use the SDK, you will need Catalyst 8.4 or higher installed on your system. If you run the binaries (you must do this as root user, or else it won't work), an RPM package will automatically be created and will afterwards be installed on your distribution. Those of you that do not use an RPM-based system will have to wait a little bit longer, until a newer version of the SDK supports your Linux distribution.

If you own any of the ATI Radeon / FireGL products, you should know that they will not work with the SDK. If you have a video card with an R600 GPU or later, it will work just fine.

Download AMD Stream SDK 1.01 Beta right now from Softpedia.