OpenCL error codes (1.x and 2.x)

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 28 April 2013 with 6 Comments

computer-says-no — Little Britain: “Compu’er says no”. (links to Youtube movie)

Knowing all errors by heart is good for quick programming, but not always the best option. Therefore I started to create a full list with extra info, taken from cl.h and the reference documentation.

The problem with many error-codes is that they are sometimes context-dependent and then become quite useless in helping the programmer out. Also some drivers return different error-codes. Notice also that different errors are given per OpenCL-version for the same function. If you find problems, help make OpenCL better and give feedback.

Want it on your wall? You can easily copy these two tables into Excel or alike software and print it out.

Continue reading “OpenCL error codes (1.x and 2.x)” →

How to get full CMake support for AMD HIP SDK on Windows – including patches

Posted by Máté Ferenc Nagy-Egri on 1 August 2023

Written by Máté Ferenc Nagy-Egri and Gergely Mészáros

Disclaimer: if you’ve stumbled across this page in search of fixing up the ROCm SDK’s CMake HIP language support on Windows and care only about the fix, please skip to the end of this post to download the patches. If you wish to learn some things about ROCm and CMake, join us for a ride.

Finally, ROCm on Windows

The recent release of the AMD’s ROCm SDK on Windows brings a long awaited rejuvenation of developer tooling for offload APIs. Undoubtedly it’s most anticipated feature is a HIP-capable compiler. The runtime component amdhip64.dll has been shipping with AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition for multiple years now, and with some trickery one could consume the HIP host-side API by taking the API headers from GitHub (or a Linux ROCm install) and creating an export lib from the driver DLL. Feeding device code compiled offline and given to HIP’s Module API was attainable, yet cumbersome. Anticipation is driven by the single-source compilation model of HIP borrowed from CUDA. That is finally available* now!

[*]: That is, if you are using Visual Studio and MSBuild, or legacy HIP compilation atop CMake CXX language support.

Continue reading →

Install OpenCL on Debian, Ubuntu and Mint orderly

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 24 June 2011 with 22 Comments

If you read different types of manuals how to compile OpenCL software on Linux, then you can get dizzy of all the LD-parameters. Also when installing the SDKs from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, you get different locations for libraries, header-files, etc. Now GPGPU is old-fashioned and we go for heterogeneous programming, the chances get higher you will have more SDKs on your machine. Also if you want to keep it the way you have, reading this article gives you insight in what the design is after it all. Note that Intel’s drivers don’t give OpenCL support for their GPUs, but CPUs only.

As my mother said when I was young: “actually cleaning up is very simple”. I’m busy creating a PPA for this, but that will take some more time.

First the idea. For developers OpenCL consists of 5 parts:

GPUs-only: drivers with OpenCL-support
The OpenCL header-files
Vendor specific libraries (needed when using -lOpenCL)
libOpenCL.so -> a special driver
An installable client driver

Currently GPU-drivers are always OpenCL-capable, so you only need to secure 4 steps. These are discussed below.

Please note that in certain 64-bit distributions there is not lib64, but only ‘lib’ and ‘lib32’. If that is the case for you, you can use the commands that are mentioned with 32-bit.

Continue reading “Install OpenCL on Debian, Ubuntu and Mint orderly” →

Download all OpenCL header files and build your own OpenCL library

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 3 June 2016

OpenCL header files

When you develop professional software, it is a best practise to have external header files fixed, to have versioning under full control. This way you don’t get the surprises when your colleague has another OpenCL SDK installed. Luckily the Khronos Group has put all version of the OpenCL header files on Github, so you can easily download the targeted OpenCL version.

Download a zip of the header files here:

If you found problems in one of these, you can directly communicate with the working group by submitting an issue on Github.

OpenCL.lib / libOpenCL.so

But wait, there is more!

You can build your own ICD, as the sources are open (licence). OpenCL version 2.1 is implemented, but it is fully backwards compatible to OpenCL 1.0. You can assume that the vendors use this code for their own, so you can safely use this code in your project.

Get the project from Github.

OpenCL Videos of AMD’s AFDS 2012

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 12 October 2012 with 4 Comments

AFDS was full of talks on OpenCL. You missed them, just like me? Then you will be happy that they put many videos on Youtube!

Enjoy watching! As all videos are around 40 minutes, it is best to take a full day for watching them all. The first part is on openCL itself, second is on tools, third on OpenCL usages, fourth on other subjects.

Continue reading “OpenCL Videos of AMD’s AFDS 2012” →

Khronos OpenCL presentation at SIGGRAPH 2010

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 9 September 2010 with 1 Comment

Here you find the videos uploaded by Khronos of their presentation about OpenCL. I added the time-line, so you can scroll to the more interesting parts easily. The presentation by Ofer Rosenberg of Intel and Cliff Woolly of NVIDIA were not uploaded (yet). Please note that for non-American people the speech of Affi Munchie is hard to hear; luckily his sheets explain most.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZFtcQ2LYw

For the first two presentations the sheets can be downloaded from the Khronos-website. The time-line has the sheet-numbers mentioned.

0:00 [sheet 1] Presentation by the president of Khronos and chair of the session: Neill Trevett of NVIDIA.
0:06 [sheet 2] Welcome and a quick overview
1:12 [sheet 3] The prizes for the attendees (not us, online viewers)
1:40 [4] Overview of all members of Khronos. Khronos does not only take care of OpenCL but also the more famous OpenGL and projects like Collada.
2:26 [5] Processor Parallelism. CPUs are getting more parallel and GPUs more programmable. The overlapping area is called Heteregenous Computing and there is where OpenCL pops up.
3:10 [6] OpenCL timeline from version 1.0 to 1.1.
4:44 [7] OpenCL workinggroup with only 30 logos. He mentions missing logos like the one from Apple.
5:18 [8] The Visual Computing Ecosystem, where OpenCL interoperability with other standards are shown. The talk is not complete, so I don;t know if he talks about DirectX.

Continue reading “Khronos OpenCL presentation at SIGGRAPH 2010” →

Intel OpenCL CPU-drivers 2013 beta with OpenCL 1.2 support

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 7 August 2012 with 7 Comments

38744 — Screenshot from Intel’s “God Rays” demo

This article is still work-in-progress

Intel has just released its OpenCL bit CPU-drivers, version 2013 bèta. It has support for OpenCL 1.1 (not 1.2 as for the CPU) on Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500 of the 3rd generation Core processors (Windows only). The release notes mention support for Windows 7 and 8, but the download-site only mentions windows 8. Support under Linux is limited to 64 bits.

The release notes mention:

General performance improvements for many OpenCL* kernels running on CPU.
Preview Tool: Kernel Builder (Windows)
Preview Feature: support of kernel source code hotspots analysis with the Intel VTuneT Amplifier XE 2011 update 3 or higher.
The GNU Project Debugger (GDB) debugging support on Linux operating systems.
New OpenCL 1.2 extensions supported by the CPU device:
- cl_khr_int64_base_atomics and cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics
- cl_khr_fp16
- cl_khr_gl_sharing
- cl_khr_gl_event
- cl_khr_d3d10_sharing
- cl_khr_dx9_media_sharing
- cl_khr_d3d11_sharing.
OpenCL 1.1 extensions that were changed in OpenCL 1.2:
- Device Fission supports both OpenCL 1.1 EXT API’s and also OpenCL* 1.2 fission core features
- Media Sharing support intel 1.1 media sharing extension and also the 1.2 KHR media sharing extension
- Printf extension is aligned with OpenCL 1.2 core feature.

Check the release notes for full information.

The drivers can be found on http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/vcsource-tools-opencl-sdk-2013/. Installation is simple. For Windows there is a installer. If you have Linux, make sure you remove any previous version of Intel’s openCL drivers. If you have a Debian-based Linux, use the command ‘alien’ to convert the rpm to deb, and make sure ‘libnuma1‘ is installed. There are requirements for libc 2.11 or 2.12 – more information on that later as Ubuntu 12.04 has libc6 2.15.

Continue reading “Intel OpenCL CPU-drivers 2013 beta with OpenCL 1.2 support” →

Install (Intel) Altera Quartus 16.0.2 OpenCL on Ubuntu 14.04 Linux

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 16 October 2016 with 2 Comments

quartus 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 Linux breeds, there is only official support for Redhat 6.5 (and CentOS).

Luckily it was very possible to have a stable installation of Quartus on Ubuntu. As information on this subject was squattered around the net and even incomplete, we decided to share our howto in this blogpost. These tips probably also work for other modern Linux-based operating systems like Fedora, Suse, Arch, etc, as most problems are due to new features and more up-to-date libraries than are provided in RedHat/CentOS.

Note1 : we did not install the FPGA on the Ubuntu-machine and neither fully researched potential problems for doing so – installing the FPGA on an Ubuntu machine is at your own risk. Have your board maker follow this tutorial to test their libraries on Ubuntu.

Note 2: we tested on Ubuntu 14.04. No guarantees if it all works on other version. Let us know in the comments if it works on other versions too. Continue reading “Install (Intel) Altera Quartus 16.0.2 OpenCL on Ubuntu 14.04 Linux” →

The 12 latest Twitter Poll Results of 2018

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 10 November 2018

Via our Twitter channel we have various polls. Not always have we shared the full background of these polls, so we’ve taken the polls of the past half year and put them here. The first half of the year there were no polls, in case you wanted to know.

As inclusive polls are not focused (and thus difficult to answer), most polls are incomplete by design. Still insights can be given. Or comments given.

Below’s polls have given us insight and we hope they give you insights too how our industry is developing. It’s sorted on date from oldest first.

It was very interesting that the percentage of votes per choice did not change much after 30 votes. Even when it was retweeted by a large account, opinions had the same distribution.

Is HIP (a clone of CUDA) an option?

Continue reading →

4-day training on OpenCL-on-FPGAs, 24-28 October, Amsterdam

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 18 August 2016

fast-fpga From 24 to 28 October we give a 4-day training on OpenCL-on-FPGAs using Altera hardware. The learning goals are correctly writing OpenCL code for FPGAs, learning to work with Quartus and understanding the important optimisation techniques.

The total costs are €2760 excluding VAT for the whole week ( 2 + 2 days of training, one pause day), including a tour in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

See the special event-page for more information.

ImageJ and OpenCL

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 30 January 2011 with 5 Comments

For a customer I’m writing a plugin for ImageJ, a toolkit for image-processing and analysis in Java. Rick Lentz has written an OpenCL-plugin using JOCL. In the tutorial step 1 is installing the great OS Ubuntu, but that would not be the fastest way to get it going, and since JOCL is multi-platform this step should be skippable. Furthermore I rewrote most of the code, so it is a little more convenient to use.

In this blog-post I’ll explain how to get it up and running within 10 minutes with the provided information.

Continue reading “ImageJ and OpenCL” →

NVIDIA ended their support for OpenCL in 2012

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 10 September 2012 with 19 Comments

If you are looking for the samples in one zip-file, scroll down. The removed OpenCL-PDFs are also available for download.

This sentence “NVIDIA’s Industry-Leading Support For OpenCL” was proudly used on NVIDIA’s OpenCL page last year. It seems that NVIDIA saw a great future for OpenCL on their GPUs. But when CUDA began borrowing the idea of using LLVM for compiling kernels, NVIDIA’s support for OpenCL slowly started to fade instead. Since with LLVM CUDA-kernels can be loaded in OpenCL and vice versa, this could have brought the two techniques more together.

What is the cause for this decreased support for OpenCL? Did they suddenly got aware LLVM would decrease any advantage of CUDA over OpenCL and therefore decreased support for OpenCL? Or did they decide so long ago, as their last OpenCL-conformant product on Windows is from July 2010? We cannot be sure, but we do know NVIDIA does not have an official statement on the matter.

The latest action demonstrating NVIDIA’s reduced support of OpenCL is the absence of the samples in their GPGPU-SDK. NVIDIA removed them without notice or clear statement on their position on OpenCL. Therefore we decided to start a petition to get these OpenCL samples back. The only official statement on the removal of the samples was on LinkedIn:

All of our OpenCL code samples are available at http://developer.nvidia.com/opencl, and the latest versions all work on the new Kepler GPUs.
They are released as a separate download because developers using OpenCL don’t need the rest of the CUDA Toolkit, which is getting to be quite large.
Sorry if this caused any alarm, we’re just trying to make life a little easier for OpenCL developers.

Best regards,

Will.

William Ramey
Sr. Product Manager, GPU Computing
NVIDIA Corporation

Continue reading “NVIDIA ended their support for OpenCL in 2012” →

OpenCL Books

[infobox type=”information”]

Want a book written be us?

Format: PDF
Digital: 150-200 pages
Price: TBD
Author: The StreamHPC team
OpenCL-version: 2.0

[/infobox]

Below are the books that are available as downloadable PDF or as a book. Please contact us if a printed book is missing. Note that I tend to be critical to books, and not to be overwhelming positive and talk in superlatives. Most books target C and C++ developers, so be sure you learn the basics of C or C++ first before learning OpenCL. Most important are bit-shifts, pointers and structs, but also thinking more in hardware than in getting-things-done is needed to get the full potential out of OpenCL. While you get that book on C, also get a book on computer-architecture to understand the concepts of bandwidth to its fullest. Then you are ready for one of the pearls below. Happy reading!

The books are ordered descending by published date, except the first.

“The OpenCL specifications” by the Khronos Group

2.0 – current version

Format: PDF
File Size: 2.2MB
Digital: 281 pages
Price: Free
Publisher: Khronos Group
Author: Aaftab Munshi (Editor)
Published Date: 13 July 2013 (version 2.0, revision 11)
OpenCL-version: 2.0
Homepage: http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/ – http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/specs/opencl-2.0.pdf

As a specifications-document, you cannot expect a nice piece of prose, but most of the knowledge you need to know is in it. There are certainly some gaps (especially in clear explanation), but every version is getting better. When studying other sources, always have this document with you as a reference. I printed it as two pages per side (A4).

Read chapters 1 to 3, and leave the rest as a reference. Other books explain the long, long lists of language specifications in a nicer form. Also the most you’ll better learn by doing.

1.2, 1.1, 1.0 – previous versions

Format: PDF
File Size: 3.3MB
Digital: 380 pages
Price: Free
Publisher: Khronos Group
Author: Aaftab Munshi (Editor)
Published Date: 14 November 2012 (version 1.2, revision 19)
OpenCL-version: 1.2
Homepage: http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/ –

As many software is still written in a previous version, it is good to know the differences. Differences between 1.1 and 1.2 are written here.

OpenCL Programming By Example

Two version available, the 1.0 version and the 1.2 version. To start with the 1.2:

Format: eBook/pBook
Pages: 304
Price: €4,50 (e), €50,- (p+e)
Publisher: PACKT
Authors: Ravishekhar Banger (AMD), Koushik Bhattacharyya (AMD)
Published Date: December 2013
OpenCL-version: 1.2
Homepage: http://www.packtpub.com/opencl-programming-by-example/book

“The OpenCL Programming Book” – Fixstars

Two version available, the 1.0 version and the 1.2 version. To start with the 1.2:

Format: eBook
Pages: 325
Price: USD 19.50
Publisher: Fixstars Corporation
Authors: Ryoji Tsuchiyama, Takashi Nakamura, Takuro Iizuka, Aki Asahara, Satoshi Miki, Jeongdo Son and Satoshi Miki. Satoru Tagawa (translator)
Published Date: January 2012
OpenCL-version: 1.2
Homepage: http://www.fixstars.com/en/opencl/book/

Format: eBook
Pages: 246
Price: free
Publisher: Fixstars Corporation
Authors: Ryoji Tsuchiyama, Takashi Nakamura, Takuro Iizuka, Akihiro Asahara, Satoshi Miki
Published Date: 31 March 2010
OpenCL-version: 1.0
Homepage: http://www.fixstars.com/en/opencl/book/OpenCLProgrammingBook/contents/

1.0-version: It seems to be translated from Japanese to English, but except some small typos and spelling errors the book is very easy to read. The book explains the chapters you could skip in Khronos’ specifications-document, but certainly is not complete since it discusses OpenCL 1.0 and has a focus on the basics. The parts where that build up a program step-by-step is a bit annoying to read, because they repeat the whole program again while only a few lines have changed. The book would be more like 180-200 pages if written more compact.

1.2-version: Thicker, more up to date and a promise there are less translation-errors.

Heterogeneous Computing with OpenCL, second edition

Format: pBook
Pages: 400 (approx.)
Price: USD 69.95
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Benedict Gaster, Lee Howes, David R. Kaeli, Perhaad Mistry & Dana Schaa
Published Date: Sept 2011
OpenCL-version: 1.2
Homepage: http://www.elsevierdirect.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780123877666

This is where we all chose OpenCL for: hybrid processors. And this book dives into that world completely, so we actually learn a lot new stuff about the advantages of having a GPU on your lap.

The new edition upgrades the book to version 1.2, but nothing much new has been added. So if you have the first edition, there is no need to buy the second edition.

OpenCL in Action

Format: eBook + pBook
Pages: 475
Price: USD 47.99 (e). USD 59.99 (p+e)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Matthew Scarpino
Published Date: non-final version updated regularly, target November 2011
OpenCL-version: 1.1
Homepage: http://www.manning.com/scarpino2/

Matthew Scarpino also wrote SWT/JFace In Action and Programming the Cell-processor, has a profession in Linux and has much experience in IT. The book seems to target an audience who want a more practical guide to learn OpenCL. He runs a blog at http://www.openclblog.com/

It is currently my favourite book and this one is a must-have for everybody interested or working with OpenCL.

OpenCL Programming Guide

Format: PDF and/or print
Pages: 648
Price: USD 35.19 (e), USD 43.99 (p), USD 59.39 (p+e)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Aaftab Munshi (Apple, Khronos Group), Benedict Gaster (AMD), Timothy G. Mattson, Dan Ginsburg
Published Date: August 2011
OpenCL-version: 1.1
Homepage: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780132488006 and http://www.openclprogrammingguide.com/

Aaftab Munshi is also responsible for the OpenCL-specifications, so he probably knows where he’s talking about.

The 648 pages it is quite bigger than the targeted 480. Currently this is a very good replacement for Fixstars’ book. Disadvantage is that sending the printed book overseas (not USA/Canada) is much too expensive and people from the Eurasian continent, Africa and Latin America should just print it locally – looking into that to find better options.

OpenCL Parallel Programming Development Cookbook

Format: pBook + eBook
Pages: 303 pages
Price: USD 26.39 (e) / 54.99 (p+e)
Publisher: PACT publishing
Author: Raymond Tay
Published Date: August 2013
OpenCL-version: 1.2
Homepage: http://www.packtpub.com/opencl-parallel-programming-development-cookbook/book

Introductory book for OpenCL beginners. Examples: histogram, Sobel edge detection, Matrix Multiplication, Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication, Bitonic sort, Radix sort, n-body.

Programming Massively Parallel Processors

Format: pBook
Pages: 258 pages
Price: USD 46.40
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: David B. Kirk (NVIDIA) and Wen-mei W. Hwu (University of Illinois)
Published Date: 28 January 2010
OpenCL-version: 1.1?
Homepage: http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/01/worlds-first-textbook-on-programming-massively-parallel-processors.html

The book claims to discuss both OpenCL and CUDA, but actually there is just one chapter on OpenCL and the focus is strong towards NVIDIA hardware. It is a nice book for people who need to learn to program CUDA-only software/hardware and don’t want a book that’s too hard to understand. There are assignments at the end of each chapter and important subjects are explained in detail, so you don’t need to have a hard time with those assignments.

It is not good for people interested in OpenCL-compliant architectures from AMD, ARM and IBM besides NVIDIA’s. It is one of the best resources to understand NVIDIA architectures from a view of a GPGPU-programmer. The second edition adds more chapters on for example MPI and OpenACC. It is also less negative about OpenCL than in the first edition.

All the members of the OpenCL working group 2013

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 7 November 2013

In the below list are the members of the OpenCL workgroup as of November 2013.

We can expect small changes each year, but this is close to the actual state. I need the rest of Q4 to finalise all the info – any help is appreciated.

This list has also been compiled in 2010, and you can see several differences. If the company has an SDK available, there is a link. That is a whole difference with the last list – this one is much more concrete. Continue reading “All the members of the OpenCL working group 2013” →

OpenCL – the battle, part III

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 18 October 2010 with 2 Comments

The first two parts described hardware-companies and operating systems, programming languages and software-companies, written about half a year ago. Now we focus on what has driven NVIDIA and ATI/AMD for decades: games.

Disclaimer: this is an opinion-piece on the current market. We are strong supporters of OpenCL and all companies which support it too. Since our advise on specific hardware in a consult will be based on specific demands on the customer, we could advise differently than would be expected on the below article.

Games

Computer games are cool; merely because you choose from so many different kinds. While Tetris will live forever, the latest games also have something to add: realistic physics simulation. And that’s what’s done by GPUs now. Nintendo has shown us that gameplay and good interaction are far more important than video-quality. The wow-factor for photo-realistic real-time rendering is not as it was years ago.
You might know the basics for falling objects: F = m*g (Force = Mass times Gravity-acceleration), and action = – reaction. If you drop some boxes, you can predict falling speed, interaction, rotation and possible change of centre of gravity from a still image as a human being. A computer has to do a lot more to detect collision, but the idea is very doable on a fast CPU. A very well-known open source library for these purposes is Bullet Physics. The nice thing comes, when there is more than just a few boxes, but thousands of them. Or when you walk through water or under a waterfall, see fire and smoke, break wood but bend metal, etc. The accelerometer of the iPod was a game-changer too in the demand for more realism in graphics. For an example of a “physics puzzle game” not using GPGPU see World of Goo (with free demo) – for the rest we talk more about high-end games. Of current game-ready systems PCs (Apple, Linux and Windows) have OpenCL support, Sony PlayStation 3 is now somewhat vague and the Xbox 360 has none.

The picture is from Crysis 3, which does not use OpenCL, as we know it.

Continue reading “OpenCL – the battle, part III” →

Legal & Website

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We focus on Europe, but have customers and business partners world wide. Therefore it is hard or even impossible to comply with all the national and international laws. If you think we should comply with certain laws, please let us know so we can have our legal advisers take a look at it. Please understand we take keeping up-to-date with laws that apply to us very serious.

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The information on the blog is provided AS-IS.

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The information on the other pages is kept up-to-date as much as possible and take our responsibility as such. Know we give all our customers personal tailored services.

The history of the PC from 2000 – 2012

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 6 May 2011 with 1 Comment

After IBM-compatible clones took over from Apple, Atari and ZX Spectrum, we just got used to that a PC is an X86 with MS Windows and Office on it. Around a decade ago Apple fought back with OSX on which Windows 7 (launched in 2009) was the first real answer. Meanwhile Apple switched to Intel, since IBM was not fast enough with the development of the POWER-processor – a huge operation, which seemed a one-time-only step for Apple at the time. SemiAccurate now speaks of Intel being replaced by ARM on Apple’s laptops.

A few weeks ago I asked Computer Science students if they knew ARM. Not even 1% had heard of it, but lots more knew there was a Samsung-chip in their smartphone. So what’s going on without us knowing it?

I’ll try to describe the market for a few key-years and then try to put the big names in it. There is a lot going on between i.e. Nvidia, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Imagination Technologies in the ARM-market, but I’ll leave that out of the story. Also not mentioned are the game-consoles and servers, but they did have big influences on the home-PC market.

In the picture at the right you see an idea of how fast the markets would have grown from a 2006 perspective. (Click on it for the full report). You see that the explosive growth of smartphones was not expected; the other detail is that the cloud also was not foreseen here.

After reading you understand why Nvidia focuses so much on HPC and mobile.

Continue reading “The history of the PC from 2000 – 2012” →

Intel’s OpenCL SDK examples for GCC

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 20 June 2011 with 3 Comments

Update august 2012: There is a new post for the latest Linux examples.

Note: these patches won’t work anymore! You can learn from the patches how to fix the latest SDK-code for GCC and Linux/OSX.

Code-examples are not bundled with the Linux OpenCL SDK 1.1 beta. Their focus is primarily Windows, so VisualStudio seems to be a logical target. I just prefer GCC/LLVM which you can get to work with all OSes. After some time trying to find the alternatives for MS-specific calls, I think I managed. Since ShallowWater uses DirectX and is quite extensive, I did not create a patch for that one – sorry for that.

I had a lot of troubles getting the BMP-export to work, because serialisation of the struct added an extra short. Feedback (such as a correct BMP-export of a file) is very welcome, since I the colours are correct. For the rest: most warnings are removed and it just works – tested with g++ (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.5.2-8ubuntu4) 4.5.2 on 64 bit (llvm-g++-4.2 seems to work too, but not fully tested).

THE PATCHES ARE PROVIDED AS IS – NO WARRANTIES!

Continue reading “Intel’s OpenCL SDK examples for GCC” →

Processors that can do 20+ GFLOPS per Watt (2012)

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 27 August 2012 with 44 Comments

energy-efficient — System for communicating power-efficiency of new equipment. “A” being best, “F” being worst. 2011-A is incomparable with 2012-A.

For yearly power-usage there is a rule-of-thumb which states that a device that is continuously on, costs the amount of Watt times 1.5 in Euro per year. So the computer in front of me, that takes around 107 Watt, costs me €160 a year if I would leave it on. A moderate cluster with several GPUs of a few hundred Watts each, would cost a few thousand Euros a year. I would say: very doable for most companies.

So why is the performance per Watt? There is more to a Watt than just the costs. The energy to cool a cluster is quite high, as most of the energy escapes via heat. And then there is the increase in demand for portable power. In cases you are thinking of sweeping you credit card for a top 10 supercomputer, then these energy-costs are extremely high.

In this article I try to get an overview of who is entering the 20+ GFLOPS/Watt area. All processors that do less than 20 GFLOPS/Watt, need to have other advantages to survive. And you’ll see that all the green processors are programmed with OpenCL, the technology StreamHPC is all about.

IMPORTANT: The total power used is sometimes including and sometimes excluding memory-transfers. So the comparison below IS NOT FAIR. The graphics cards are including memory-transfers, while the CPUs and SoCs are not.

Continue reading “Processors that can do 20+ GFLOPS per Watt (2012)” →

Professional and Consumer Media Software using OpenCL

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 28 December 2013

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, you should buy NVIDIA hardware”. I expected this to happen, but could not tell in what industry they would run fastest. Seems it is fluid dynamics, video-editors and photo-editors.

AMD and Intel mostly have been selected as collaboration partners. Apple has been a main drive, especially with the introduction of their new MAC Pro with two high-end AMD FirePro GPUs.

Sony Catalyst Family

Sony released three new software packages to support video professionals in pre- and post-production.

This new family of products, Catalyst Browse (media management), Catalyst Prepare (video preproduction assistant) and Catalyst Edit (4K and Sony RAW video editing) has OpenCL support from the start.

Colorfront Express Dailies and On-Set Dailies

This software is an on-set dailies processing system (playback and sync, QC, colour grading, audio and metadata management).

The 2014 versions have OpenCL support in their transcoder plugin, Transkoder.

RED REDCINE-X PRO

REDCINE-X is a coloring toolset, integrated timeline, and post effects collection in a professional, flexible environment for your 4K or 5K .R3D files. RED has added support for OpenCL in build 22.

The Foundry Nuke Blink framework

As presented on GPUconf, The Foundry has opened their framework for running OpenCL kernels. It creates OpenCL-kernels (optimised for AMD or NVIDIA) from C++ Blink kernels.

NUKE studio is a node-based VFX, editorial and finishing studio. As with most products on this page, look for the “reel” to get a nice demo of its capabilities.

Magix Hybrid Video Engine

Video Deluxe and Movie Edit both have OpenCL support since 2012, thanks to the new shared video engine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27M7vJIYR3c

Adobe CS6 creative suite

Adobe has entered the OpenCL market publicly with . With Premiere Pro (video editing) and Photoshop (photo-editing) two main products with advanced GPU-acceleration via OpenCL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3LwNT1QUPQ

Video on GPU-effects on Premiere Pro CS5.

FAQ on GPU-acceleration on Photoshop CS6.

Sony Vegas Pro

Vegas Pro is a video editing software package for non-linear editing systems, and has OpenCL support since version 10d. Also in the consumer version (Sony Movie Studio) there is OpenCL-support.

RealFlow Hybrido2 engine

RealFlow is fluid dynamics software and its new engine Hybrido2 has support for OpenCL since this year. And you just have to love their commercial videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0err96BbQ

Autodesk Maya

Maya is a toolsets to help create and maintain the modern, open pipelines you need to address today’s challenging 3D animation, visual effects, game development and post-production projects. Since the 2013 version it is accelerated for physics simulations via Bullet and OpenCL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36bIdH6EBkM

ArcSoft SimHD and Sim3D engine

ArcSoft media-engines SimHD and Sim3D have OpenCL support since several years and are used in several of their products.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvXyLKEeX2I

BlackMagic Design

BMD has two suites which use OpenCL, Resolve and Fusion. DaVinci was acquired in 2009 and EyeOn in 2014.

(DaVinci) Resolve

Resolve has real-time colour correction thanks to OpenCL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfrudtCTwv0

(Eyeon) Fusion

Fusion is an image compositing software program created by eyeon Software Inc. It is typically used to create visual effects and digital compositing for film, HD and commercials.

It uses OpenCL since version 6.

Roxio Creator Suite

Roxio uses OpenCL for accelerated rendering in their suite. They were one of the first to implement OpenCL – I think already in 2010, before OpenCL was even cool.

Unluckily they don’t have much information – just a mention that they have support.

Apple Final Cut Pro and iMovie

Apple has support in Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4.

Also iMovie works a lot faster when you have an OpenCL capable MAC.

Blender Cycles & Bullet

You cannot find any demonstration of new video hardware without Big Bucks Bunny, the short CG movie created with Blender.

It uses OpenCL in two parts: physics simulations (Bullet) and compositor (Cycles).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbzE8jOO7_0

Side Effects Houdini

Houdini is a procedural node based 3D animation and visual effects tools for film, broadcast, entertainment and visualisation production.

http://vimeo.com/46444204

DigitalFilmTools

There is support for OpenCL in zMatte, Composite Suite Pro and Film Stocks since Q4 2013.

zMatte is a keyer for blue and green screen composites. Composite Suite Pro is a collection of visual effects plug-ins. Film Stocks simulates color and black and white still photographic film stocks, motion picture films stocks and historical photographic processes.

OTOY OctaneRender 3

OctaneRender is a GPU-based, real-time 3D, unbiased rendering application. In March 2015 OTOY announced OctaneRender 3, which has full OpenCL support:

OpenCL support: OctaneRender 3 will support the broadest range of processors possible using OpenCL to run on Intel CPUs with support for out-of-core geometry, OpenCL FPGAs and ASICs, and AMD GPUs.

Below is a reel of OcateRender 2 with CUDA. According to OTOY the performance on AMD and NVidia is comparable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLSBVt0VQSI

SAM Alchemist XF

Alchemist XF supports format and framerate conversion from SD up to 4K for a wide variety of file formats at high speed.

More?

There is a lot more OpenCL-powered software coming up rapidly (we hear things). But we also missed (or accidentally forgot) software. Please help making this list complete and send us an email.

Gedit OpenCL Syntax Highlighting

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 1 February 2011 with 1 Comment

Update 17-06-2011: updated version of opencl.lang and added opencl_host.lang.

When learning a language it is nice to do it the hard way, so you take the default txt-file editor provided with your OS. No colours, not help, no nothing, pure hard-core learning. But in Linux-desktop Gnome the default editor Gedit is quite powerful without doing too much, has an official Windows-port and has a OSX Darwin-port. It took just a few hours to understand how highlighting in Gedit works and to get it implemented. I got some nice help from the work done at the cuda-highlighter by Hüseyin Temucin (for showing how to extend the c-highlighter the best way) and the VIM OpenCL-highlighter by Terence Ou (for all the reserved words). This is work in progress; I will tell about updates via Twitter.

Get it

Windows-users first need to download Gedit for Windows. OSX-folks can check Darwin-ports. Then the files opencl.lang (.cl-files) and opencl_host.lang (extension of c to highlight OpenCL-keywords) needs to be put in /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/ (or in ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/ for local usage only), or for Window in C:Program Filesgeditsharegtksourceview-2.0language-specs or for OSX in /Applications/gedit.app/Contents/Resources/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/. Make sure all Gedit-windows are closed so the configuration will be re-read, and then open a .cl-file with Gedit. If you have opened cl-files as C or Cuda, you have to set the highlighting to OpenCL manually (under view -> highlighting). For host-code you always need to set the highlighting manually to “OpenCL host”. You might want to associate cl-files with Gedit.