  We present HONEI, an open-source collection of libraries offering a hardware
oriented approach to numerical calculations. HONEI abstracts the hardware, and
applications written on top of HONEI can be executed on a wide range of
computer architectures such as CPUs, GPUs and the Cell processor. We
demonstrate the flexibility and performance of our approach with two test
applications, a Finite Element multigrid solver for the Poisson problem and a
robust and fast simulation of shallow water waves. By linking against HONEI's
libraries, we achieve a twofold speedup over straight forward C++ code using
HONEI's SSE backend, and additional 3-4 and 4-16 times faster execution on the
Cell and a GPU. A second important aspect of our approach is that the full
performance capabilities of the hardware under consideration can be exploited
by adding optimised application-specific operations to the HONEI libraries.
HONEI provides all necessary infrastructure for development and evaluation of
such kernels, significantly simplifying their development.
