Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a dimensionality reduction technique for exploratory data analysis. Its primary effect is to "squash" data into a visualizable space. For example, your data may be 7 dimensional, but be distributed in a clustered way. One can process the data with MDS to produce a set of two-dimensional coordinates that can be plotted and visually analyzed.
There are essentially two ways to delinate MDS:

• metric and nonmetric scaling
• classical and distance scaling

Glimmer doesn't handle nonmetric scaling, so I only describe the classical/distance dichotomy. Classical scaling is a method for linearly projecting the data into a subspace and is essentially equivalent to principal components analysis. The projection is optimal in the least-squared error sense and always exists.
Distance scaling is a little more nuanced than classical scaling. Rather than finding the least-squares projection, distance scaling seeks to minimize the total least-squared differences between the distances in the source coordinates of the data and the low-dimensional "squashed" coordinates.
In many cases this strategy offers qualitative advantages to classical scaling, but the optimal solution is NP-Hard. Worse, the objective function (called "stress") is multi-modal, so local minima exist.

Glimmer is an algorithm for performing metric distance scaling. It uses the GPU to reduce the total computation time and it employs a hierarchical approach to improve the quality of the final solution. For more details, please consult the journal article.

Glimmer can be downloaded here. It is offered as a compressed visual c++ project. The "cpusources" directory contains the CPU code written in c++ and the "gpusources" directory contains the GPU shader code written in GLSL.

You will need to have an need to have a somewhat recent NVIDIA card, with the latest drivers and the latest version (as of 7/14/08) of Visual C++. The README has instructions on using glimmer. The EXAMPLE download contains sample datasets and command lines including DOS scripts to reproduce the figures in the paper.