Manifold GIS set to leverage GPU's much more widely in v9 ?

If you are interested in the path the next version of Manifold likely is taking, the following screencast of Dimitri's recent presentation at the Nvidia GPU Conference gives us some hints! Altough Dimitri  doesn't in this presentation go into any great specific detail about Manifold v9 CUDA capabilities (expected as that the presentation was not covered by an Non Disclosure Agreement), nonetheless, this presentation seems to be the closest one can get to a technical presentation by Manifold at a User Meeting, minus the NDA!

First, Dimitri goes into a lot of detail about the fundamental software development challenges for GPU programming, much of which is over my head in terms of technical detail. Sadly, all the examples in this presentation refer to raster processing, which is already present in Manifold v8.

The second half of the talk is clearly more interesting, as he presents fundamental architectural work developing a lightweight processing scheduler. This scheduler seems to be the key infrastructure element enabling efficient workload paralellisation, enabling Manifold to optimally leverage a heterogeneous environment of multiple CPU's and GPU's. One thing that seems to be clear from this presentation is that Manifold over the past two years have been very busy rewriting large parts of their core code to enable the paralellisation of almost all GIS tasks inside Manifold. Particularly interesting is the mention at the end that they are in a position to take advantage of any GPGPU platform (Nvidia and AMD), which implies the adoption of OpenCL by Manifold for their next release.

PostGIS Developments Presentation

If you didn't get a chance to fly down to Sydney to attend the FOSSG4 conference (I certainly didn't!), they now have video casts up of most presentations at http://blip.tv/search?q=fosslc. One I found interesting was a great video cast of the presentation by Paul Ramsey on development progress on PostGIS at the recent FOSSG4.

A great mention as well for Manifold as one of the GIS packages supporting PostGIS in the video by Paul Ramsey, although he alleges to some FUD that Manifold the company spread regarding PostGIS ( at 13:15 in the video, although I don't remember what particular Dimitri postings he was referring too :-)


According to Paul's presentation, PostGreSQL (with PostGIS) certainly seems to be at least equal to other spatially enabled databases in terms of feature completeness, performance and robustness, and its free, making procurement much easier (19:00 min in video). And the new release of PostGIS seems to be all about speed improvements, which is obviously a good thing. A overview of the roadmap ahead for PostGIS promises a lot of things to come...

Now, my interest in PostGIS has only started lately, mostly because I was asked to develop a "Introduction to Spatial Databases" e-learning course. Given the need for students to be able to run the practicals on their home computers, we chose PostGIS and Quantum GIS as the software tools for the tutorials. I must say I have been impressed by the functionality of PostGIS, and it certainly hasn't been a very steep learning curve for me, thanks mostly to my previous Spatial SQL knowledge learned from Manifold's Spatial SQL experience. Although the syntax and some of the commands are slightly different between PostGIS SQL and Manifold Spatial SQL, knowledge of either is really helpful when trying to write queries! Wider issues of optimisation such as spatial indexes though present another level of complexity/power in PostGIS,  which Manifold's internal SQL engine doesn't expose to the user.

"Introduction to GIS & Cartography" Course Dates announced

Just a quick note to say we have finalised dates for the next session of our "Introduction to GIS and Cartography" course using Manifold GIS in February (18th and 19th) 2010 here at UCL.  Please find below the detailed invitation:

The invitation is also available in PDF format with a detailed agenda

The Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, will be hosting an Introduction to Geographical Information Systems and Cartography Course on the 18^th and 19^th of February 2010. This course is aimed at novice or potential GIS Users interested in key concepts of geographical data capture, storage and analysis. After course completion participants will be able to generate, manipulate and analyse geographic information confidently and create high-quality cartographic outputs.

The course is organised into modules containing comprehensive overviews of fundamental topics relating to Geographical Information Systems, databases and cartography, alongside hands-on tutorials teaching participants the most important functionalities of GIS.

The course will introduce users to and use Open Street Map (OSM) data and Manifold GIS software. Participants will be tutored by leading GIS lecturers and researchers with extensive GIS expertise in a commercial and academic context.

Participants will receive a comprehensive training manual containing all of the course content such as presentation slides, tutorial worksheets, project files and datasets used. This training manual will act as a valuable reference guide after the course is completed.

Each participant can expect:

• Experienced academic tutors


• A workstation preloaded with all software and data for the tutorials


• State-of-the-art air-conditioned computer room


• Comprehensive course documentation folder


• Course Certificate from UCL on completion


• Lunch and refreshments provided

The course fee is £650 (incl. VAT) per participant. Please note that we have arranged a discount for organisations sending two or more participants. The course will be held on UCL’s main campus in Bloomsbury, Central London.

For booking and any further enquiries, please email Patrick Weber at p.weber@ucl.ac.uk or you can phone +44 (0)20 7679 2745 .