We present HONEI, an open-source collection of libraries oering 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 
exibility 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-specic operations to the HONEI libraries. HONEI provides
all necessary infrastructure for development and evaluation of such kernels,
signicantly simplifying their development.