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Wow, that is really neat. I would imagine Java's parallel-friendly data structures help make that feasible? (vigorously discussed in this thread a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6505786)

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Its probably not as sexy as that. All data structures have to be copied from CPU land to GPU land, and the GPU is limited in the kind of pointer chasing it can do (so simple linked lists might work, but they are mostly about vectors and matrices).

Well, this is OpenCL backed and the latest OpenCL is all about sharing the memory space between CPU and GPU. AMD has for some time been making a big deal of sharing the same view of virtual memory on GPU and CPU sides. Which lets you use the same pointers from both sides.

https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-finalizes-opencl-...

"Host and device kernels can directly share complex, pointer-containing data structures such as trees and linked lists, providing significant programming flexibility and eliminating costly data transfers between host and devices."

iirc they're aiming for Value types and a new JNI for Java 9, so that could simplify some of those issues.

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