Patent US 8,957,906

A method and an apparatus for a parallel computing program using subbuffers to perform a data processing task in parallel among heterogeneous compute units are described. The compute units can include a heterogeneous mix of central processing units (CPUs) and graphic processing units (GPUs). A system creates a subbuffer from a parent buffer for each of a plurality of heterogeneous compute units. If a subbuffer is not associated with the same compute unit as the parent buffer, the system copies data from the subbuffer to memory of that compute unit. The system further tracks updates to the data and transfers those updates back to the subbuffer.