The fifth International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) will be held on 16-18 May 2017 in Toronto, Canada. The event kicks-off with a full-day Advanced Hands-On OpenCL tutorial which is followed by two-days of conference: keynotes, academic papers, technical presentations, tutorials, poster sessions…
We have been awarded the Khronos project to upgrade the OpenCL test suite to 2.2!
Some weeks ago we started with implementing the Compiler Test Suite for OpenCL 2.2. The biggest improvement of OpenCL 2.2 is C++ kernels, which originally was planned for 2.1. SPIRV 1.1 is another big improvement. We are very happy to have…
AMD gets into Machine Intelligence with “MI” range of hardware and software
In June we wrote on “AMD is back!“, where this is one of the blog posts with more details in a specific direction. This post is about AMD specifically targeting machine learning with the MI ( = Machine Intelligence) range of hardware and…
Opinions crossing the table: Khronos for world peace
At SC16 there was a discussion between programming language standards for heterogeneous hardware, organised by Khronos. See here for the setup of the session. It was expected to be a heated discussion, but in the end it was a good conversation with lost of…
Install (Intel) Altera Quartus 16.0.2 OpenCL on Ubuntu 14.04 Linux
To temporarily increase capacity we put Quartus 16.0.2 on an Ubuntu server, which did not go smooth – but at least smoother than upgrading packages to required versions on RedHat/CentOS. While the download says “Linux” and you’re expecting support for multiple…
Accelerating an Excel Sheet with OpenCL
One of the world’s most used software is far from performance optimised and there is hardly anything we can do about it. I’m talking about Excel. There are various engine replacements which promise higher speeds, but those have the disadvantage that they’re…
Online Tutorials are here
We’re going online with our presentations and tutorials. This makes it easy to reach more people and make our trainings more flexible. We’re starting with short introductory trainings, but we have bigger plans. Keep an eye on our events (shared on Twitter,…
How we sped up a flooding simulation 35 times (from 32-core CPU to multi-GPU)
How water moves through an area given a certain pace of instream, can be fully simulated. We got a request to make such simulation faster, as it took already too much time to do moderate simulations. As the customer wanted to…
Get ready for conversions of large-scale CUDA software to AMD hardware
In the past years we have been translating several types of software to AMD, targeting OpenCL (and HSA). The main problem was that manual porting limits the size of the to-be-ported code-base. Luckily there is a new tool in town. AMD…
Dear Linux-users, during the transition period for FGLRX to AMDGPU/ROCm there’s no kernel 4.4 or Xorg 1.18 support
The information you find everywhere: on Linux the current “radeon” and “fglrx” are being replaced by AMDGPU (graphics) and ROCm (compute) for HSA-enabled GPUs. As the whole AMD Linux driver team is seemingly working on getting the new and open source…
CUDA Compute Capability 6.1 Features in OpenCL 2.0
The CUDA page on Wikipedia includes a table listing Compute Capabilities. While verifying support for AMD Fiji GPUs, such as the Radeon Nano and FirePro S9300 X2, I became curious about how much functionality is still missing in OpenCL. After comparing…
Rant: No surprise there’s a shortage of good GPU-developers
We could read here that software is critical for HPC – a market where accelerators/GPUs are used a lot. So all we need to do is to better support all GPU-developers as a whole, not? Unfortunately something else is happening. Each…
4-day training on OpenCL-on-FPGAs, 24-28 October, Amsterdam
From 24 to 28 October we give a 4-day training on OpenCL-on-FPGAs using Altera hardware. The learning goals are correctly writing OpenCL code for FPGAs, learning to work with Quartus and understanding the important optimisation techniques. The total costs are €2760 excluding VAT for…
Porting code that uses random numbers
When we port software to the GPU or FPGA, testability is very important. A part of making the code testable, is getting its functionality fully under control. And you guessed already that run-time generated random numbers takes good attention. In a selection…
Random Numbers in Parallel Computing: Generation and Reproducibility (Part 2)
In the first part of our two-part blog series, we have discussed how parallel computing applications can best use pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) so as to benefit from parallel computing speedups, without negatively impacting the statistical properties of the random numbers…
Strengthen our team as a remote worker (freelancer)
In the past year we’ve been working on more internal projects and therefore we’re seeking strong GPU-coders (good OpenCL experience required) worldwide. This way you can combine staying close to your family and working with advanced technologies. You will be on…
Performance can be measured as Throughput, Latency or Processor Utilisation
When you ask how fast code is, then we might not be able to answer that question. It depends on the data and the metric. In this article I’ll give an overview of different ways to describe speed and what metrics…
OpenCL.org internship/externship
Want to help build an important website? OpenCL.org’s components have been designed and partly built, but still a lot of work needs to be done. We’re seeking an intern (or “extern” when not in Amsterdam) who can help us build the…
AMD is back!
For years we haven been complaining on this blog what AMD was lacking and what needed to be improved. And as you might have concluded from the title of this blogpost, there has been a lot of progress. AMD is back! It will…
ISC lunch discussion: Portable Open Standards in HPC
Are you around at ISC and have an opinion on portable open standards? Then you should join the discussion with other professionals at ISC. Some suggestions for discussions: (non)-preference for open standards like OpenCL, OpenMP, HSA and OpenACC. Portability versus performance. Using scripting…
Let’s meet at ISC in Frankfurt
Vincent Hindriksen will be walking around at ISC from 20 to 22 June. With me I bring our latest brochure, some examples of great optimisations and some Dutch delicacies. Also we will also have some exciting news with an important partner – stay tuned!…