Every now and then I read stories on Bitcoins (Wikipedia-article), as GPUs are used a lot to “mine” Bitcoins. They have some extensive benchmarks, and also their discussions giving me insights in specific parts of accelerators like GPUs. Also is this…
The OpenCL power: offloading to the CPU (AVX+SSE)
Say you have some data that needs to be used as input for a larger kernel, but needs a little preparation to get it aligned in memory (small kernel and random reads). Unluckily the efficiency of such kernel is very low…
AMD positions FirePro S10000 against both TESLA K10 (and K20)
During the “little” HPC-show, SC12, several vendors have launched some very impressive products. Question is who steals the show from whom? Intel got their Phi-processor finally launched, NVIDIA came with the TESLA K20 plus K20X, and AMD introduced the FirePro S10000….
Intel’s answer to AMD and NVIDIA: the XEON Phi 5110P
NOTE: there are many contradicting sources out there, so there are mistakes in this article. Please give me feedback via twitter, mail or comments, so all the info can be completed. Yes, another post in the answer-to series. At SC12 Intel…
NVIDIA’s answer to FirePro S9000: the TESLA K20
Two months ago I wrote about the FirePro S9000 – AMD’s answer to the K10 – and was already looking forward to this K20. Where in the gaming world, it hardly matters what card you buy to get good gaming performance,…
All OpenCL SDKs now in our Knowledge Base
For who hasn’t seen the latest addition to our knowledge base, we have added a list of all (almost) available OpenCL-SDKs. You can find it in the menu under “Knowledge Base” -> “SDKs…“. This list shows how important OpenCL is getting, as…
Scientific Visualisation of Molecules
In many hard sciences focus is on formulas and text, whereas images are mainly graphs or simplified representations of researched matters. Beautiful visualisations are mainly artist’s impressions in popular media targeting hobby-scientists. When Cyrille Favreau made the first good-working version of…
Targetting various architectures in OpenCL and CUDA
The question we aim to answer in this post is: “How to do you make software that performs on several platforms?”. Note: This article is not fully finished – I’ll add more information during the coming months. It’s busy here! Even…
OpenCL Videos of AMD’s AFDS 2012
AFDS was full of talks on OpenCL. You missed them, just like me? Then you will be happy that they put many videos on Youtube! Enjoy watching! As all videos are around 40 minutes, it is best to take a full…
OpenCL on Altera FPGAs
On 15 November 2011 Altera announced support for OpenCL. The time between announcements for having/getting OpenCL-support and getting to see actually working SDKs takes always longer than expected, so to get this working on FPGAs I did not expect anything before…
4 October talk in Amsterdam on mobile compute
Thursday 4 October I talk on mobile compute at Hackers&Founders Amsterdam on what mobile compute can do. The goal is to initiate new ideas for start-ups, as not many know their mobile phone and tablet is very powerful and next year…
Avoiding false dependencies in only two steps
Let’s approach the concept of programming through looking at the brain, the code and the computer. The idea of a program lives in the brain of a programmer. The way to get the program to the computer is using a system…
Do you have GPU-brains? A poster-initiative.
This is a message to GPU-programmers only. It is a simple question, and has many answers: what are GPU-brains? How is it possible your brain can code GPUs and only few friends and colleagues understand what you are doing? Is it thinking in parallel,…
AMD’s answer to NVIDIA TESLA K10: the FirePro S9000
Recently AMD announced their new FirePro GPUs to be used in servers: the S9000 (shown at the right) and the S7000. They use passive cooling, as server-racks are actively cooled already. AMD partners for servers will have products ready Q1 2013 or even…
NVIDIA ended their support for OpenCL in 2012
If you are looking for the samples in one zip-file, scroll down. The removed OpenCL-PDFs are also available for download. This sentence “NVIDIA’s Industry-Leading Support For OpenCL” was proudly used on NVIDIA’s OpenCL page last year. It seems that NVIDIA saw a…
Processors that can do 20+ GFLOPS per Watt (2012)
For yearly power-usage there is a rule-of-thumb which states that a device that is continuously on, costs the amount of Watt times 1.5 in Euro per year. So the computer in front of me, that takes around 107 Watt, costs me…
When Big Data needs OpenCL
Big Data in the previous century was the archive full of ring-binders/folders/ordners, which would grow each year at the same pace. Now the definition is that it should grow each year as much as all years before combined. A few months…
The CPU is dead. Long live the CPU!
Look at the computers and laptops sold at your local computer shop. There are just few systems with a separate GPU, neither as PCI-device nor integrated on the motherboard. The graphics are handled by the CPU now. The Central Processing Unit…
Intel OpenCL CPU-drivers 2013 beta with OpenCL 1.2 support
This article is still work-in-progress Intel has just released its OpenCL bit CPU-drivers, version 2013 bèta. It has support for OpenCL 1.1 (not 1.2 as for the CPU) on Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500 of the 3rd generation Core processors (Windows only). The…
Taking on OpenCL
OpenCL is getting more and more important and for more developers a skill worth having. At StreamHPC we saw this coming in 2010 and have been training people in OpenCL since. A few weeks ago I got a question on how to take…
How expensive is an operation on a CPU?
Programmers know the value of everything and the costs of nothing. I saw this quote a while back and loved it immediately. The quote by Alan Perlis is originally about Perl LISP-programmers, but only highly trained HPC-programmers seem to have obtained…