While going through my email, I found out about the third “HiPEAC Student Heterogeneous Programming Challenge”. Unfortunately the deadline was last week, but just got an email: if you register by this weekend (17 September), you can still join. EDIT: if…
The single-core, multi-core and many-core CPU
CPUs are now split up in 3 types, depending on the number of cores: single (1), multi (2-8) and many (10+). I find it more important now to split up into these three types, as the types of problems to be…
HPC centre EPCC says: “Better software, better science”
The University of Edinburgh houses the HPC centre EPCC. Neelofer Banglawala wrote about a programme which funds the development and improvement of scientific software, and also discussed about the results. Many of the 10 most used application codes on ARCHER have…
Demo: cartoonizer on an Altera Arria 10 FPGA
It takes quite some effort to program FPGAs using VHDL or Verilog. Since several years Intel/Altera has OpenCL-drivers, with the goal to reduce this effort. OpenCL-on-FPGAs reduced the required effort to a quarter of the time, while also making it easier…
CPU Code modernisation – our hidden expertise
You’ve seen the speedups possible on GPUs. We secretly know that many of these techniques would also work on modern multi-core CPUs. If after the first optimisations the GPU still gets an 8x speedup, the GPU is the obvious choice. When…
New training dates for OpenCL on CPUs and GPUs!
OpenCL remains to be a popular programming language for accelerators, from embedded to HPC. Good examples are consumer software and embedded devices. With Vulkan potentially getting OpenCL-support in the future, the supported devices will only increase. For multicore-CPUs and GPUs we…
IWOCL 2017 slides and proceedings now available
A month ago IWOCL (OpenCL workshop) and DHPCC++ (C++ for GPUs) took place. Meanwhile many slides and posters have been published online. As of today 23 talks are with slides. The proceedings are available via the ACM Digital Library. This needs…
Bug fixing the MESA 3D drivers
Most of our projects are around performance optimisation, but we’re cleaning up bugs too. This is because you can only speed up software when certain types of bugs are cleared out. A few months ago, we got a different type of…
Slow Software Hotline
In the perfect world all software is fast, giving us time to do actual work. Unfortunately we live in an unperfect world, and we have to spend extra time controlling our anger as the software keeps us waiting. Therefore we have…
Why did AMD open source ROCm’s OpenCL driver-stack?
AMD open sourced the OpenCL driver stack for ROCm in the beginning of May. With this they kept their promise to open source (almost) everything. The hcc compiler was open sourced earlier, just like the kernel-driver and several other parts. Why…
Khronos Releases OpenCL 2.2 With SPIR-V 1.2
Today Khronos has released OpenCL 2.2 with SPIR-V 1.2. The most important changes are: A static subset of the C++14 standard as a kernel language. The OpenCL C++ kernel language includes classes, templates, lambda expressions, function overloads and many other constructs…
Caffe and Torch7 ported to AMD GPUs, MXnet WIP
Last week AMD released ports of Caffe, Torch and (work-in-progress) MXnet, so these frameworks now work on AMD GPUs. With the Radeon MI6, MI8 MI25 (25 TFLOPS half precision) to be released soonish, it’s ofcourse simply needed to have software run…
Rebranding the company name from StreamComputing to StreamHPC
Since 2010 the name StreamComputing has been used and is widely known now in the GPU-computing industry. But the name has three problems: we don’t have the .com domain, it does not directly show what we do, and the name is…
What is Khronos as of today?
The Khronos Group is the organization behind APIs like OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenCL. Over one hundred companies are a member and decide together what your next year phone, camera, computer or media device will be capable of. We work most with…
AMD ROCm 1.5 Linux driver-stack is out
ROCm is AMD’s open source Linux-driver that brings compute to HSA-hardware. It does not provide graphics and therefore focuses on monitor-less applications like machine learning, math, media processing, machine vision, large scale simulations and more. For those who do not know…
DHPCC++ Program known
During IWOCL a workshop takes place that discusses the opportunities that C++ brings to OpenCL-enabled processors. A well-know example is SYCL, but various other approaches are talked about. The Distributed & Heterogeneous Programming in C/C++ Workshop just released their program: HiHAT:…
IWOCL 2017 – all the talks
An overview of all the tutorials and talks for easy reading. You can also download the PDF. Heterogeneous Computing Using Modern C++ with OpenCL Devices – Rod Burns and Ruyman Reyes (Codeplay) This hands-on session will provide an opportunity to get…
StreamComputing is 7 years!
As of 1 April we are 7 years old. Because of all the jokes on that day, this post is a bit later. Let me take you through our journey how we grew up from a 1-person company to what we’re…
Looking for the company’s GPU-pioneers
Several projects were introduced to us via the company’s GPU-pioneer. These collaborations were very successful and pleasant to do, due to the internal support within the company. This is a reason we would like to do more of these – this…
GPUs and Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2017
What brings 2017 in technology? Gartner gives their vision with the start of each year to give insight in which technologies to invest in. When looking through them, the most important enabling technologies are the GPU and Internet-of-Things (IoT) – see…
When to use Artificial Intelligence and when to use Algorithms?
The main strength of Artificial Intelligence is it’s easy to understand by anybody. This results in new applications in all industries at a rapid pace. Are there new possibilities generated or have the possibilities always been possible? The answer is both….