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.

In case of totally unknown input, AI is better capable of adapting. A clearly defined algorithm has much more unpredictable behavior in such cases.

If the input is known well, the tables are turned. AI could give unpredictable results and with that introducing hard-to-solve bugs. Algorithms do exactly what it is designed for, also often at a much higher performance.

Making the wrong choice here results often in a much more expensive solution. Continue reading “When to use Artificial Intelligence and when to use Algorithms?” →

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 ones are reduce and scan operations. Those patterns have been used in many OpenCL software and can now be implemented in a more straightforward way. The promise to the developers was that the vendors now can provide better performance using none or very little local memory. However, the promised performance wasn’t there from the beginning.

Recently, at StreamHPC we worked on improving performance of certain OpenCL kernels running specifically on AMD GPUs where we needed OpenGL-interop and thus chose Catalyst-drivers. It turned out that work-group and sub-group functions did not give the expected performance on both Windows and Linux. Continue reading “Double the performance on AMD Catalyst by tweaking subgroup operations” →

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.

Two winners

We’ll pick two winners: one from academia and one from industry. If you select “other” as your background, then share which category you fall in the last field.

Did you already subscribe and also want to win? I am not forgetting you – more details are in a newsletter next quarter.

More winners, by referring to a friend

If you refer a colleague, a friend or even a stranger to subscribe, you can both win a mug. Just be sure he/she remembers to mention you to me when I ask. Before you ask: the maximum referral-length is 5 (so referral of referral of referral of referral, etc) plus the one who started it.

UPDATE: If you win a mug and were not referred by somebody, you can pick a co-winner yourself. Joy should be shared.
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You can also use this link http://eepurl.com/bgmWaP.

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.

For years we have promoted this unique advantage, for which we use OpenCL, CUDA, HIP and several other languages. Always having full projects in mind, but unfortunately not clearly communicating this.

During discussions with several existing and new customers, it became suddenly clear that we are seen as a company that fixes code, not one that builds the full code.

It became most clear that when was suggested to let us collaborate with another party, where our role would be to make sure they would not make mistakes regarding performance and code-quality.

• Customer:   You can work with a team we hired before.
• Us:             We also do full projects.
• Customer:   Really?

This would mean we would be the seniors in the group, but not own the project – a suboptimal situation, as important design decisions could be ignored. Continue reading “Customer: “So you also do full projects?”” →

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 will only get bigger.

Currently Intel drivers best supports SPIRV, making it the first target for the new SPIRV-frontends. It is unknown which vendor will be next – probably one which (almost) has OpenCL 2.0 drivers already, such as AMD, ARM, Qualcomm or even NVidia.

How interesting is SPIRV really?

So if SPIRV is really that important a reason to choose for OpenCL, I thought of framing it towards CUDA-devs on twitter in a special way:

Should CUDA 9 support SPIRV?

So that’s a big yes for SPIRV-support on CUDA. And why not? Don’t we want to program in our own language and not be forced to use C or C++? SPIRV makes it possible to quickly add support in any language out there without official support of the vendor. Let wrappers handle the differences per vendor and let SPIRV be the shared language for GPU-kernels. Where do we need OpenCL or CUDA for, if the real work is defined by SPIRV?

What do you think? Leave your comment below how you see the future of GPGPU with SPIRV in town. Is 2017 the year of SPIRV?

And if you worked on a SPIRV-frontend, get in touch to continue your project on https://github.com/spirv. Yes, it’s empty right now, but you don’t know what’s hidden.

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 did our own tests on a GTX 1080 on Windows and could confirm that for Windows the green team is halfway there. NVIDIA still has to implement pipes, enable non-uniform work-group sizes (this happens when in ND-range global_work_size is not divisible by the local_work_size), and fix a few bugs in device side enqueue.

Today we decided to test out NVIDIA latest driver (378.13) for 64-bit Linux and check its support for OpenCL 2.0.

NVIDIA, OpenCL 2.0 and Linux

Just like on Windows, our GTX 1080 reports that it is an OpenCL 1.2 devices. It is understandable since support for OpenCL 2.0 is only in beta stage. In the following table you’ll find an overview of the 2.0 functions supported by this Linux driver.

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The host-side functions clSetKernelExecInfo(), clCreateSamplerWithProperties() and clCreateCommandQueueWithProperties() are also present and working.

As you can see, the support for OpenCL 2.0 on Linux is almost exactly the same as on Windows. But in contrast with the Windows-drivers, we were able to successfully compile and run several more kernels that use device side queue. It may indicate that this feature is being actively developed and maybe in future drivers it will work much better – for both Linux and Windows.

What you can do to make it better

As NVIDIA only adds new functionality to OpenCL driver when requested, it is very important that they receive these requests. So when you or your employer is a paying customer, do keep requesting the features you need. Know that NVIDIA knows that lacking required functionality will be bad for their sales.

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:

• Reduce processing time
  • Meeting timing requirements
  • Increasing user efficiency
  • Increasing the responsiveness
  • Reducing latency
• Do more in the same time
  • Increasing simulation/data sizes
  • Adding extra functionality
• Reduce operational costs
  • Reducing the server count
  • Reducing power usage

Let’s go into each of these. Continue reading “The 8 reasons why our customers had their code written or accelerated by us” →

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 PRACE Summer of HPC 2017 programme

The main objective of this programme is to enable HiPEAC member companies in Europe to have access to highly skilled and exceptionally motivated research talent. In turn, it offers PhD students from Europe a unique opportunity to experience the industrial research environment and to work on R&D projects solving real problems.

Below explains both programmes in detail. Continue reading “Master+PhD students, applications for two PRACE summer activities open now” →

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 have expected 1000. Or 2000 with hyper-threading. Handling so many more threads than the number of available cores might sound inefficient. There are a few reasons why a GPU has been designed to handle so many threads. Read further…

NOTE: The below description is a (very) simplified model with the purpose to explain the basics. It is far from complete, as it would take a full book-chapter to explain it all. Continue reading “How many threads can run on a GPU?” →

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 available and two are at StreamHPC.

What is this industrial PhD internship, you may ask? From the HiPEAC homepage:

The HiPEAC Industrial PhD Internship Programme offers PhD students a unique opportunity to experience the industrial research environment and to work on R&D projects solving real problems. To date the internship programme has resulted in several joint paper publications, patent applications and many students have been hired by the companies after completion of their PhDs.

 

The internships cover a 3-month period. Students should indicate when they will be available for an internship during 2016. When you apply for one of the internships, you must update your profile page including a link to your CV (preferably in PDF format).

Every intern receives €55 per day (€5000 for 3 months) + travel expenses (maximum €500). The main goal is to gain experience. Even if you don’t get a job after the internship, you tap into our network.

Continue reading “Funded PhD internships at StreamHPC” →

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 and table-top demonstrations.

IWOCL 2017 Call for Submission Now Open – Submit your abstract here. Deadline is beginning of February, so better submit the coming month!

Call for IWOCL 2017 Annual Sponsors is also open. For that contact the IWOCL organisation via this webform.

Every year there have been unique conversations having real influence on the OpenCL standard, and we heard real-life development experience during various talks. If you missed the real technical talks at certain other GPU conferences, then IWOCL is where you should go.

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 a part in making OpenCL better! We find OpenCL C++ kernels very important, even if it has its limitations. Thanks to SPIRV 1.1 it gets easier to have more (unofficial) kernel languages next to C and C++, and to get SYCL. Also upgrading from 2.0 to 2.2 is rather easy thanks to the open source libclcxx.

Personally I found this project to also be very important for our internal knowledge building, as almost every function would be touched and discussed.

OpenCL 2.2 CTS RFQ has been awarded to StreamHPC

Dec 14th – Khronos issued a Request For Quote (RFQ) back in September 2016 to enhance and expand the existing OpenCL 2.1 conformance tests to create an OpenCL 2.2 test suite to be used to define conformance for OpenCL 2.2 implementations. The contract has been awarded to StreamHPC. StreamHPC is a software consultancy company specialized in performance tuned software development for CPU, GPU and FPGA. A large part of their clients hires them for their OpenCL expertise.

Already improvements have been added, bugs splatted and documentation improved. We hope to continue this the coming months!

We’ll be ready in March. Hopefully the first implementations are ready by then, as there is a test suite ready to iron out any bug discovered. Which three OpenCL drivers do you think will be first to have OpenCL 2.2? Intel, AMD, NVidia, ARM, Imagination, Qualcomm, TI, Intel FPGA (Altera), Xilinx, Portable OpenCL or another?

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 software.

With all the news around AMD’s new processors Ryzen (CPU) and VEGA (GPU), it became apparent that AMD wants a good share of the Deep Learning market.

And they seem to succeed. Here is the current status.

Hardware: 25 TFLOPS @ 16-bit

Recently released have been the “Radeon Instinct” series, which purely focus on compute. How the new naming of AMD is organised will be discussed in a separate blog post. Continue reading “AMD gets into Machine Intelligence with “MI” range of hardware and software” →

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 learning.

The main message from each language seems to be: “Yes, we’re working on that feature”. This means that a programming language is just like human languages, as new things get named and described world-wide. This also shows the hard work the development of languages bring, as new feature-requests are a constant. Continue reading “Opinions crossing the table: Khronos for world peace” →

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” →

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 still not fast enough with really heavy calculations. Another option is to use much faster LibreOffice, but companies prefer ribbons over new software. The last option is to offer performance-optimised modules for the problematic parts. We created a demo a few years ago and revived it recently. Continue reading “Accelerating an Excel Sheet with OpenCL” →

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, LinkedIn, this blog and the newsletter) to see what the offerings are. And you’re very welcome to join!

On 4 October (new date) there will be an OpenCL 101 of two hours for free. Target timezone is East-America and Europe.

Agenda Online OpenCL 101

• Introductions (20 minutes)
  • StreamHPC
  • GPUs and paralellism
  • OpenCL
• By example: Getting started with OpenCL (30 minutes)
• By example: Porting a simple program to OpenCL (30 minutes)
• Q&A in parallel (30 minutes). Ask us any question, for instance:
  • General OpenCL.
  • OpenCL on GPUs.
  • OpenCL on FPGAs.
  • What algorithms work well with GPUs, CPUs and FPGAs.
  • StreamHPC services.
• The next steps (5 minutes).
• Closing words (5 minutes).

Read more here…

Tutorial server

You can already test if the tutorial server works for you by looking around in our demo room. The tutorial itself will be in another room. Use your own name and password “ap“.

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See you soon!

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 be able to have more details, larger areas and more alternative situations computed, the current performance did not suffice.

The code was already ported to MPI to scale to 8 cores. This code was used as a base for creating our optimised GPU-code. Using a single GPU we managed to get an 44 to 58 times speedup over single core CPU, which is 5 to 7 times faster than MPI on 8 to 32 CPU cores.

For larger experiments we could increase the performance advantage over MPI-code from 7 times to a total of 35 times, using multiple GPUs.

We solved both the weak-scaling problem and the mapping on GPUs

If you add the 9x speedup of the initial performance-optimisation, the total is over 2600x. What could be done in a year, now can be done in 3.5 hours. This clearly shows the importance of software performance engineering. Most code already had some optimisations applied (just like here) and 5 to 7 times speedup is quite achievable.

Read below for some more details. Continue reading “How we sped up a flooding simulation 35 times (from 32-core CPU to multi-GPU)” →

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 now offers HIP, which converts over 95% of CUDA, such that it works on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware. That 5% is solving ambiguity problems that one gets when CUDA is used on non-NVIDIA GPUs. Once the CUDA-code has been translated successfully, software can run on both NVIDIA and AMD hardware without problems.

The target group of HIP are companies with older clusters, who don’t want to pay the premium prices for NVIDIA’s latest offerings. Replacing a single server with 4 Tesla K20 GPUs of 3.5 TFLOPS by 3 dual-GPU FirePro S9300X2 GPUs of 11 TFLOPS will give a huge performance boost for a competitive price.

The costs of making CUDA work on AMD hardware is easily paid for by the price difference, when upgrading a GPU-cluster.

Continue reading “Get ready for conversions of large-scale CUDA software to AMD hardware” →

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 drivers ready, fglrx is now deprecated and will not get updates (or very late). I therefore can get to the point:

When using fglrx on Linux, don’t upgrade to Linux distributions with a kernel later than 4.2 or Xorg server versions beyond 1.17!

For Ubuntu this means no 14.04.5 or 16.04 or later. When you have 14.04.4, the kernel will not upgrade when you go to 14.04.5. CentOS/RedHat has such old kernels, there currently is no issue. Fedora users simply have a problem, as they already go towards 4.8.

Continue reading “Dear Linux-users, during the transition period for FGLRX to AMDGPU/ROCm there’s no kernel 4.4 or Xorg 1.18 support” →