One year on, I reran the analysis on forum participation, and to my regret, not much has changed with a continued fall in user form posts. Forum contribution numbers have now in March 2011 reached the level of mid-2006. 2006 of course marked the release of  Manifold 7.0, which first introduced significant entreprise level features into the product, and which the graph reflected in an impressive spike in forum participation numbers.

Apart from the near stasis in which Manifold 8.0 now is, with some intermittent bug fix updates still provided, other developments have also impacted community participation. Significantly, after a period in January 2011 of intense discussion on the forum, Manifold introduced a new set of forum posting rules that effectively now limit the discussion on technical issues, precluding any discussion of Manifold’s business practices and company developments. Also, copyright infringement claims were logged against various individuals that set up independent Manifold community hubs on sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn (disclosure: I am the administrator of the LinkedIn Manifold user group), resulting in the closure of the Facebook page.

These tightening of business practices interestingly coincided with the apparent transferral of Manifold’s business address from CDA International, based in Carson City, Nevada, to a new company, Manifold Software Limited, with headquarters in Hong-Kong.

What can be a conclusion from all this? As it stands, not much has changed, and although Manifold 8.0 is still as good a product as four years ago, one can only wonder if there will ever be another significant update? Manifold’s competitors are also catching up, and significantly offering new developments in web-based services, an area which Manifold has left to third-party developers to further develop so far. Also some of the key technical advantages of Manifold are eroding, for example true 64bit operation in ESRI’s ArcGIS 10.1, weakening Manifold’s claims of technical superiority.

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.

Carson City, NV USA — 16 March 2009 — Manifold.net today announced a new world record for the number of processors used in a personal computer for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) processing. At the company’s 2009 European User Meeting in London, Manifold demonstrated an upcoming new software product that simultaneously utilized over 1440 processor cores to perform a remote sensing image computation at supercomputer speed with over 3.5 teraflops of performance. Manifold demonstrated the new software on a desktop 64-bit Windows PC equipped with three NVIDIA GTX 295 GPU cards costing less than $500 each. (Illustration at right shows the demonstration hardware.)

Wow, I didnt know that we witnessed a world record at the User Meeting back in February here at UCL! Well I am glad that Manifold came and did their demo of Release 9.0, even though they did so in their usual hyberbole style.

Also, good to see that they are showing commitment to a release date around June. This should imply a beta starting in the next weeks…!!!