Now that smartphones get more powerful and internet makes it possible to have all functionality and documents with you anywhere, the computer needs to be reinvented. You see all big IT-companies searching for how that can be, from Windows Metro to…
PDFs of Monday 16 April
By exception, another PDF-Monday. OpenCL vs. OpenMP: A Programmability Debate. The one moment OpenCL and the other mom ent OpenMP produces faster code. From the conclusion: “OpenMP is more productive, while OpenCL is portable for a larger class of devices. Performance-wise, we…
5 types of loops you should avoid
In “Separation of compute, control and transfer” I talked about node-wise programming as a method we should embrace instead of trying to unroll the existing loops. In this article I get into loops and discuss a few types and how they…
Supporting OpenCL on your own hardware
Say you have a device which is extremely good in numerical trigoniometrics (including integrals, transformations, etc to support mainly Fourier transforms) by using massive parallelism. You also have an optimised library which takes care of the transfer to the device and the…
Separation of Compute and Transfer from the rest of the code.
In the beginning of 2012 I spoke with Patrick Viry, former CEO of Ateji – now out-of-business. We shared ideas on GPGPU, OpenCL and programming in general. While talking about the strengths of his product, he came with a remark which I found important…
StreamHPC flirts with ARM
With the launch of twitter-channel @OpenCLonARM we now officially show a strong interest in ARM for compute. And we are not the only ones, as the twitter already has 80 followers (60 in 1.5 day and 12 retweets of the welcome-message)….
AccelerEyes ArrayFire
There is a lot going on at the path to GPGPU 2.0 – the libraries on top of OpenCL and/or CUDA. Among many solutions we see for example Microsoft with C++ AMP on top of DirectCompute, NVidia (and more) with OpenACC, and…
Theoretical transfer speeds visualised
There are two overviews I use during my training, and I would like to share with you. Normally I write them on a whiteboard, but it has advantages having it in a digital form. Transfer speeds per bus The below image…
Do your (X86) CPU and GPU support OpenCL?
Does your computer have OpenCL-capable hardware? Read on and find out if your computer is compatible… If you want to know what other non-PC hardware (phones, tablets, FPGAs, DSPs, etc) is running OpenCL, see the OpenCL SDK page. For people who only…
Basic concepts: Function Qualifiers
In the OpenCL-code, you have run-time and compile-time of the C-code. It is very important to make this clear when you talk about compile-time of the kernel as this can be confusing. Compile-time of the kernel is at run-time of the…
Black-Scholes mixing on SandyBridge, Radeon and Geforce
Intel, AMD and NVidia have all written implementations of the Black-Scholes algorithm for their devices. Intel has described a kernels in their OpenCL optimisation-document (page 28 and further) with 3 random factors as input: S, K and T, and two configuration-constants R and V….
OpenCL potentials: Watermarked media for content-protection
HTML5 has the future, now Flash and Silverlight are abandoning the market to make the way free for HTML5-video. There is one big problem and that is that it is hard to protect the content – before you know the movie…
Differences from OpenCL 1.1 to 1.2
This article will be of interest if you don’t want to read the whole new specifications [PDF] for OpenCL 1.2. As always, feedback will be much appreciated. After many meetings with the many members of the OpenCL task force, a lot of ideas sprouted….
Basic Concepts: online kernel compiling
Typos are a programmers worst nightmare, as they are bad for concentration. The code in your head is not the same as the code on the screen and therefore doesn’t have much to do with the actual problem solving. Code highlighting…
Kernels and the GPL. Are we safe and linking?
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and below is my humble opinion only. The post is for insights only, not for legal matters. GPL was always a protection that somebody or some company does not run away with your code and…
Basic Concepts: OpenCL Convenience Methods for Vector Elements and Type Conversions
In the series Basic Concepts I try to give an alternative description to what is said everywhere else. This time my eye fell on alternative convenience methods in two cases which were introduced there to be nice to devs with i.e. C/C++ and/or…
Installing both NVidia GTX and AMD Radeon on Linux for OpenCL
August 2012: article has been completely rewritten and updated. For driver-specific issues, please refer to this article. Want to have both your GTX and Radeon working as OpenCL-devices under Linux? The bad news is that attempts to get Radeon as a…
OpenCL Potentials: Investment-industry
This is the second in the series “OpenCL potentials“. I chose this industry because it is the finest example where you are always late, even if you were first. So it always must be faster if you want to make the…
AMD OpenCL coding competition
The AMD OpenCL coding competition seems to be Windows 7 64bit only. So if you are on another version of Windows, OSX or (like me) on Linux, you are left behind. Of course StreamHPC supports software that just works anywhere (seriously, how…
The current state of WebCL
Years ago Microsoft was in court as it claimed Internet Explorer could not be removed from Windows without breaking the system, while competitors claimed it could. Why was this so important? Because (as it seems) the browser would get more important…
Dutch: Gratis kennisochtend over de nieuwe generatie processoren
Ergens opgevangen dat grafische kaarten tegenwoordig ingezet kunnen worden voor zware berekeningen? Tijdens een koffiegesprek gehoord over vector-processors als aanvulling op scalaire processors? Dan wordt het tijd dat u de grote veranderingen op processorgebied op een rijtje krijgt om uw organisatie…