[andrewcooke]

i do! i write custom code for a small "consultancy" in geophysics (we're a handful of people from academia that somehow ended up developing software for people - and it doesn't really have to be geophysics, that's just where we started...).

my most successful project was an inverse problem for mining - taking a bunch of seismic traces and, from that, calculating a 3d map of the source structure (microseismicity - this technique is called SET (seismic emission tomography)). there's an abstract here - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMIN41A1352D (if anyone wants i can send them the poster, if i can find it!).

incidentally, the AMD OpenCL implementation worked fine on Intel processors already (and has done for a year or so now). i made some notes at http://www.acooke.org/cute/Developing0.html

it's very similar to cuda, but has a couple of advantages. first, it's really well supported on macs. second you aren't stuck with nvidia's hardware (their support is terrible - had a client stuck waiting on results for weeks because they wouldn't respond to issues that eventually turned out to be a failed board). the main disadvantage is that the associated tools/libs aren't as mature.

and a final piece of advice - if you have a finite budget, and don't need 64bit support, you get way better performance per $ using average gaming cards rather than their top-end GPU hardware (although i suspect we'll try out amazon's gpu cloud stuff soon and avoid our own hardware for projects that don't have huge data sets).