If there would be one rule to get the best performance, then it’s avoiding data-transfers. Therefore it’s important to have lots of bandwidth and GFLOPS per processor, and not simply add up those numbers. Everybody who has worked with MPI, knows why: transferring…
PHD position at university of Newcastle
At the university of Newcastle they use OpenCL for researching the performance balance between software and hardware. This resource management isn’t limited to shared memory systems, but extends to mixed architectures where batches of co-processors and other resources make it much more complex…
SC15 news from Monday
Warning: below is raw material, and needs some editing. Today there was quite some news around OpenCL, I’m afraid I can’t wait till later to have all news covered. Some news is unexpected, some is great. Let’s start with the great news, as the…
OpenCL at SC15 – the booths to go to
This year we’re unfortunately not at SuperComputing 2015 for reasons you will hear later. But we haven’t forgotten about the people going and trying to find a share of OpenCL. Below is a list of companies having a booth at SC15, which…
An OpenCL-on-FPGAs presentation in a bar
What do you do when you want to explain OpenCL and FPGAs and OpenCL-on-FPGAs to a beer drinking crowd in just 15 minutes? Well, you simply can’t go deep into the matter. On a Thursday evening, 5 November 2015, I was standing on…
Porting Manchester’s UNIFAC to OpenCL@XeonPhi: 160x speedup
As we cannot use the performance results for most of our commercial projects because they contain sensitive data, we were happy that Dr. David Topping from the University of Manchester was so kind to allow us to share the data for the UNIFAC…
Our “new” Bug Hunting & Removal Service
We recently started a new service, which we were actually doing for years already. You can also learn from this: one can become very experienced in a task and then noticing years later that it can be a service on itself. So starting years…
We more than halved the FPGA development time by using OpenCL
Over the past year we developed and fine-tuned a project setup for FPGA development that is much faster than any other method, including other high-level languages for making FPGA-based systems. How we did it OpenCL makes it easy to use the CPU and GPU…
OpenCL in the cloud – API beta launching in a month
We’re starting the beta phase of our AMD FirePro based OpenCL cloud services in about a month, to test our API. If you need to have your OpenCL based service online and don’t want to pay hundreds to thousands of euros for…
The magic of clGetKernelWorkGroupInfo
It’s not easy to get the available private memory size – actually it’s impossible to get this information directly from the device/drivers, using the OpenCL API. This can only be explained after you dive deep into clGetKernelWorkGroupInfo – the function that tells you…
Call for papers: SYCL workshop, 13-March-2016, Barcelona, Spain
A high-level language has been on OpenCL’s roadmap since the years, and would be started once the foundations were ready. Therefore with OpenCL 2.0, SYCL was born. To keep the pace high, a SYCL workshop is being organised. This week the call-for-papers is…
We’re a member of Khronos now!
For years we have had a good collaboration with the Khronos group, mainly due our community presence. Now it was time to get into a closer collaboration and become an official Contributor Member (logo not there yet). This effectively means two things: Instead…
Handling OpenCL with CMake 3.1 and higher
There has been quite some “find OpenCL” code for CMake around. If you haven’t heard of CMake, it’s the most useful cross-platform tool to make cross-platform software. Put this into CMakeLists.txt, changing the names for the executable. #Minimal OpenCL CMakeLists.txt by StreamHPC…
How to do Approximation Computing in OpenCL
Approximation computing is allowing larger errors when performing calculations. While most programmers might go the other way (lower error rate) by using doubles for instance, this field is interesting for quite some of us. The reason is that you can get more performance,…
Let us do your peer-review
There are many research papers that claim enormous speed-ups using an accelerator. From our experience a large part is because of code-modernisations (parallisation & optimisation), which makes the claim look false. That’s why we offer peer-reviews for half our rate for CUDA…
OpenCL basics: Multiple OpenCL devices with the ICD.
Most systems nowadays have more than just one OpenCL device and often from different vendors. How can they all coexist from a programming standpoint? How do they interact? OpenCL platforms and OpenCL devices Firstly, please bear with me for a few…
“Soon we will use only one thousandth of available computer capacity”
At StreamHPC we mostly work for companies in the bigger countries of Europe and North America. We hardly work for companies in the Netherlands. But it seems that after 5 years of sleeping, there is some shaking. Below is a (translated) article with…
MediaTek’s partners deliver OpenCL on their phones
Several Chinese phones bring OpenCL to millions of users, as MediaTek offers their drivers to all phone vendors who use their (recent) chipsets. Mediatek said that you just need a phone with one of the below chipsets and you can run your…
The knowns and unknowns of the PEZY-SC accelerator at RIKEN
The green500 is out and one unknown processor takes the number one position with a huge improvement over last year. It is a new super-computer installed at RIKEN with an incredible 7 GFLOPS/Watt. It is powered by the processor-boards at the right:…
Xeon Phi Knights Corner compatible workstation motherboards
Intel has assumed a lot if it comes to XeonPhi’s. One was that you will use it on dual-Xeon servers or workstations and that you already have a professional supplier of motherboards and other computer-parts. We can only guess why they’re not…
Event: Embedded boards comparison
Date: 17 September 2015, 17:00 Location: Naritaweg 12B, Amsterdam Costs: free Selecting the right hardware for your OpenCL-powerd product is very important. We therefore organise a three hour open house where we you can test, benchmark and discuss many available chipsets…