OpenCL 2.0 added several new built-in functions that operate on a work-group level. These include functions that work within sub-groups (also known as warps or wavefronts). The work-group functions perform basic parallel patterns for whole work-groups or sub-groups. The most important…
Win an OpenCL mug!
The first batch is in and you can win one from the second batch! We’re sending a mug to a random person who subscribes to out newsletter before the end of 17 April 2017 (Central European Time). Yes, that’s a Monday….
Customer: “So you also do full projects?”
One of these moments when you find out that the company is not seen as I want it to be seen. Compared to generic software engineering companies, we have the advantage of creating software that is capable of processing more data….
Should SPIRV be supported in CUDA?
Would you like to run CUDA-kernels on the OpenCL framework? Or Python or Rust? SPIRV is the answer! Where source-to-source translations had several limitations, SPIRV 1.1 even supports higher level languages like C++. SPIRV is the strength of OpenCL and it…
NVIDIA beta-support for OpenCL 2.0 works on Linux too
In the release notes for 378.66 graphics drivers for Windows (February 2017), NVIDIA officially spoke about supporting OpenCL 2.0 for the first time. Unfortunately, this is partial support only and, as NVIDIA said, these new [OpenCL 2.0] features are available for evaluation purposes only. We…
NVIDIA enables OpenCL 2.0 beta-support
In the release notes for NVIDIA 378.66 graphics drivers for Windows NVIDIA mentions support for OpenCL 2.0. This has been the first time in 3 years since OpenCL 2.0 has been launched, that they publicly speak about supporting it. Several 2.0 functions…
The 8 reasons why our customers had their code written or accelerated by us
In the past six years we have helped out various customers solve their software performance problems. While each project has been very different, there have been 8 reasons to hire us as performance engineers. These can be categorised in three groups:…
Master+PhD students, applications for two PRACE summer activities open now
PRACE is organising two summer activities for Master+PhD students. Both activities are expense-paid programmes and will allow participants to travel and stay at a hosting location and learn about HPC: The 2017 International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences The…
How many threads can run on a GPU?
Q: Say a GPU has 1000 cores, how many threads can efficiently run on a GPU? A: at a minimum around 4 billion can be scheduled, 10’s of thousands can run simultaneously. If you are used to work with CPUs, you might…
Funded PhD internships at StreamHPC
We have several wishes for 2017 and two of them are to make code for the open source community. Luckily HiPEAC is interested in more collaboration between academia and industry and therefore funds PhD internships. There are 81 industrial PhD internships…
IWOCL 2017 Toronto call for talks and posters is open
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…