In computing, Close To Metal (CTM, originally Close-to-the-Metal) is the name of a beta version of a low-level programming interface developed by ATI, now the AMD Graphics Product Group, aimed at enabling GPGPU computing.
[citation needed] Close To Metal, originally called THIN (Thin Hardware INterface) and Data Parallel Virtual Machine, gave developers direct access to the native instruction set and memory of the massively parallel computational elements in modern AMD video cards.
[2] Stream SDK provides high-level in addition to low-level tools for general-purpose access to AMD graphics hardware.
Using GPUs to perform computations holds a lot of potential for some applications because of the fundamental differences of GPU microarchitectures compared to CPUs.
[3] Some components of CTM and the Stream SDK are open source, such as the Brook+ C-like language and compiler.