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Category: Technical

Gromacs-OpenCL

Starting with GROMACS and OpenCL

Now that GROMACS has been ported to OpenCL, we would like you to help us to make it better. Why? It is very important we get more projects ported to OpenCL, to get more critical mass. If we only used our…

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SANAM_csm_TE_GSI_3697_highres_0efc5b22d3[1]

Why this new AMD FirePro Cluster is important for OpenCL

Then it hit the doormat: “AMD is proud to collaborate with ASUS, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, (FIAS) and GSI to support such important physics and computer science research,” said David Cummings, senior director and general manager, professional graphics, AMD….

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SC14

OpenCL at SC14

During SC14 (SuperComputing Conference 2014), OpenCL is again all over New Orleans. Just like last year, I’ve composed an overview based on info from the Khronos website and the SC2014 website. Finally I’m attending SC14 myself, and will give two talks…

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Square_rounding

OpenCL integer rounding in C

Getting about the same code in C and OpenCL has lots of advantages, when maximum optimisations and vectors are not needed. One thing I bumped into myself was that rounding in C++ is different, and decided to implement the OpenCL-functions for…

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luxrenderer

Mega-kernel versus Micro-kernels in LuxRender (repost)

Below is a (slightly edited) repost of a blog by David Bucciarelli (homepage, twitter) on the Luxrender forum. I find micro-kernels an important subject, since micro-kernels have clear advantages. In OpenCL 2.0 there are more possibilities to create smaller kernels. Also…

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gromacs-logo-square-gromacs-on-top

We ported GROMACS from CUDA to OpenCL

GROMACS is an important molecular simulation kit, which can do all kinds of  “soft matter” simulations like nanotubes, polymer chemistry, zeolites, adsorption studies, proteins, etc. It is being used by researches worldwide and is one of the bigger bio-informatics softwares around….

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macresearch

OpenCL tutorial videos from Mac Research

A while ago macresearch.com stopped from existing, as David Gohara pulled the plug. Luckily the sources of a very nice tutorial were not lost, and David gave us permission to share his material. Even if you don’t have a MAC, then…

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intern

We’re looking for an intern to do the cool stuff: benchmarking and Linux wizarding

We have some embedded devices here, which badly need attention. Some have gotten some private time on the bench, but we did not share anything on the blog yet with our readers. We simply need some extra hands to do this….

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3_lab-laseeb

A short story: OpenCL at LaSEEB (Lisboa, Portugal)

The research lab LaSEEB (Lisboa, Portugal) is active in the areas of Biomedical Engineering, Computational Intelligence and Evolutionary Systems. They create software using OpenCL and CUDA to speed-up their research and simulations. They were one of the first groups to try…

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9781118942208.pdf

Why use OpenCL on FPGAs?

Altera has just released the free ebook FPGAs for dummies. One part of the book is devoted to OpenCL, so we’ll quote some extracts here  from one of the chapters. The rest of the book is worth a read, so if you want to…

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OpenCL support levels

The below table shows the current state of OpenCL, SPIR and HSA for each vendor. [table id=6 /] EP = Embedded Profile, FP = Full Profile.

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one-way-2

OpenCL support on recent Android smartphones

The embedded world is so extremely flexible, because it is full of open standards. We therefore expect that big processor vendors will push harder than Google can push back. OpenCL-support is very important for GPGPU-libraries like ArrayFire, VexCL, ViennaCL – these…

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async_all_the_things1

Using async_work_group_copy() on 2D data

When copying data from global to local memory, you often see code like below (1D data): [raw] if (get_group_id(0)==0) { for (int i=0; i < N; i++) { data_local[i] = data_global[offset+i] } } mem_fence(CLK_LOCAL_MEM_FENCE); [/raw] This can be replaced this with…

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positioning

Market Positioning of Graphics and Compute solutions

When compute became possible on GPUs, it was first presented as an extra feature and did not change much to the positioning of the products by AMD/ATI and Nvidia. NVidia started with positioning server-compute (described as “the GPU without a monitor-connector”),…

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valgrind_amd

Valgrind suppression file for AMD64 on Linux

Valgrind is a great tool for finding possible memory leaks in code written in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, assembly code, Fortran, Ada, etc. I use it to check out if the provided code is ok, before I start porting it…

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top500

Building a 150 TFLOPS cluster with Accelerators in 2014

You can’t ignore accelerators when designing a new cluster for HPC anymore. Back in 2010 I suggested to use GPUs to enter the Top 500 with a budget of only €38k. It takes ten times more now, as almost everybody started…

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opencl-intel-video

Intel promotes OpenCL as THE heterogeneous compute solution

At Intel they have CPUs (Xeon, Ivy Bridge), GPUs (Isis) and Accelerators (Xeon Phi). OpenCL enables each processor to be used to the fullest and they now promote it as such. Watch the below video and see their view on why…

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opencl20

Big announcements: SYCL 1.2, WebCL 1.0 and OpenCL 2.0

Khronos just announced three OpenCL based releases:  SYCL 1.2 Provisional Spec – Abstraction Layer for Leveraging C++ and OpenCL WebCL 1.0 Final Spec – JavaScript bindings to OpenCL OpenCL 2.0 Adopters Program – Conformance for OpenCL 2.0 implementations Below I’ve quoted…

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Khronos-meetup-march-SanFrancisco

Khronos Invites Press & Game Developers to Sessions @ GDC San Francisco

Khronos just sent out the below message to Press and Game Developers. To my understanding, there are many game devs under the readers of this blog, so I’d like you to share the message with you. JOIN KHRONOS GROUP AT GDC…

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V-UV

Commodity and Open Standards – why OpenCL matters

This article actually discusses the question: is GPGPU a solution for the masses, or is it for niche-products? For the latter open standards matter a lot less, as you will read. If you watch the below video on sale&marketing by Victor…

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S10000

OpenCL hardware test centre @ StreamHPC

Wanting to test your OpenCL-software on specific hardware? From now on, that is possible by logging in on StreamHPCs test-servers. Update: new prices. Got feedback it should compete with Amazon EC2. During the beta-period (February to April) we have available: [list1]…

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