14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports reveal that Apple has chosen to open-source its multiprocessor task-management technology – Grand Central Dispatch. Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage of new, powerful hardware by making all the components of Mac OS X multicore-aware. Thus, the technology optimizes resources for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors.
“More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors,” Apple explains on its website. “[...] Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.”
OSXDaily calls Apple’s move of releasing Grand Central Dispatch into the Open Source community “surprising,” and cites AppleInsider on a possible explanation – “Significant new outside interest in Grand Central Dispatch could result in a wider support base for building parallelism compatible with Apple’s other open technologies, such as OpenCL.”
AppleInsider, for its part, cites Drew McCormack, writing for MacResearch, who notes that, “Until today, it would have been very unlikely that any new UNIX tools would be developed on Mac OS X using Grand Central, simply because they would only run on the Mac. With the possibility that Grand Central will become available on other UNIX systems, the likelihood that Grand Central will be incorporated into command line tools is greatly increased.” As a result, the move could potentially help Apple leverage its technologies in markets such as in the enterprise and supercomputing sectors – places where Apple hasn’t seen a major adoption yet.
As noted in the report, Apple’s Grand Central isn’t the only technology the company has decided to open-source. WebKit, the powerful layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages, is also Apple-developed and is the foundation of Google’s Chrome web browser. WebKit is an open source web-browser engine, but it is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and other Mac apps. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.
Those interested in learning more about Grand Central Dispatch can download and review the GCD technology brief (PDF).