Michael Leahy spoke on AnDevCon’13 about OpenCL on Android. Enjoy the overview! Subjects (globally): What is OpenCL 13 dwarfs RenderScript Demo Mr.Leahy is quite critical about Google’s recent decisions to try to block OpenCL in favour of their own proprietary RenderScript…
Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) – the TL;DR
The main problem of discrete GPUs is that memory needs to be transferred from CPU-memory to GPU-memory. Luckily we have SoCs (GPU and CPU in one die), but still you need to do in-memory transfers as the two processors cannot access…
PRACE Spring School 2014
On 15 – 17 April 2014 a 3-day workshop around HPC is organised. It is free, and focuses on bringing industry and academy together. Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC) / Johannes Kepler University Linz Kirchenplatz 5b (Castle of Hagenberg) 4232 Hagenberg…
First Khronos Chapter meeting in Amsterdam: WebGL/OpenGL
Thursday 13 February 2014 the first Khronos meetup in will take place. We expect a small group, so the location will be cozy and there will be enough time to talk with a beer. First round is on me, admission is…
OpenCL alternatives for CUDA Linear Algebra Libraries
While CUDA has had the advantage of having many more libraries, this is no longer its main advantage if it comes to linear algebra. If one thing changed over the past year, then it is linalg library-support for OpenCL. The choices…
European HPC Magazines
If one thing can be said about Europe, is that it is quite diverse. Each country solves or fails to solve its own problems individually, while European goals are not always well-cared for. Nevertheless, you can notice things changing. One of…
VectorFabrics: 2014 will be parallel
Toolmaker VectorFabrics sent 9 predictions for this year in their newsletter. I’d like to share it with you. Nine predictions for 2014 that prove the programming landscape is changing It is not hard to predict that this year will see a…
ARM Mali-T604 GPU has 3.5x more performance than dual core Cortex-A15
According to the latest newsletter of the Mont-Blanc Project, it was explained that the GPU on a Samsung Exynos 5 is much faster and greener than its CPU: 3.5 times faster with half the energy. They built a supercomputer using 810…
Professional and Consumer Media Software using OpenCL
More and more professional media software now has support for OpenCL. It starts to be a race where you cannot stay behind. If the competitor runs more than twice as fast on the same hardware, then you just can’t say “Sorry,…
OpenCL SPIR by example
OpenCL SPIR (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) is an intermediate representation for OpenCL-code, comparable to LLVM IL and HSAIL. It is a search for what would be a good representation, such that parallel software runs well on all kinds of accelerators. LLVM…
SC14 Workshop Proposals due 7 February 2014
Just to let you know that there should be even more OpenCL and related technologies on SC14 Are you interested in hosting a workshop at SC14? Please mark your calendars as SC will be accepting proposals from 1 January – 7…
FortranCL working example
Last week I needed to get Fortran working with OpenCL. As the example-page is not up-to-date and not much documentation is on the interwebs outside the official page, this was not as straight-forward as I hoped. The test-suite and this article…
The OpenCL event of the year: IWOCL 2014 – Bristol, UK, 12 & 13 May
Khronos has supported and organised for the second time the International Workgroup on OpenCL (IWOCL, pronounced as “eye-wok-ul”). Last year the event took place at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. This year the event will be held in…
The Exascale rat-race vs getting-things-done with HPC
When the new supercomputer “Cartesius” of the Netherlands was presented to the public a few months ago, the buzz was not around FLOPS, but around users. SARA CEO Dr. Ir. Anwar Osseyran kept focusing on this aspect. The design of the…
Basic concepts: malloc in the kernel
During the last training I got a question how to do malloc in the kernel. It was one of those good questions, as it gives another view on a basic concept of OpenCL. Simply put: you cannot allocate (local or global)…
Partner up with StreamHPC for Horizon 2020!
For those working in a research-department at a company or university within the EU, Horizon 2020 might be a bit of a familiar sound. For us this is an important program and a source possibilities for collaboration in the coming years. Our expertise…
StreamHPC launches monthly trainings in Europe
Every second Monday of the month StreamHPC offers an OpenCL training in Mathematics or Media-operations. The target is OpenCL 1.2 (or 1.1 when NVIDIA is discussed). OpenCL 2.0 trainings will start in Q2/Q3, or when on request. All trainings will be…
OpenCL at SC13
Unluckily I am not at SC13, so I’ll enjoy from a distance. Luckily I don’t miss one of the most beautiful 15km runs in the Netherlands. When there is more news, I’ll add to this post – below is mostly taken…
CUDA 6 Unified Memory explained
AMD, ARM-vendors and Intel have been busy unifying CPU and GPU memories for years. It is not easy to design a model where 2 (or more) processors can access memory without dead-locking each other. NVIDIA just announced CUDA 6 and to…
AMD updates the FirePro S10000 to 12GB and passive cooling
Let the competition on large memory GPUs begin! Some algorithms and continuous batch processes will have the joy of the extra memory. For example when inverting a large matrix or doing huge simulations, you need as much memory as possible. or…
CUDA’s multiple targets, the OpenCL version
I’d like to share two images. The following image is being shared for quite some time, to show the technical capabilities of CUDA. I replaced “CUDA source” by “OpenCL source” and worked from there. Result: I know it is not optimised…