OpenCL is getting more and more important and for more developers a skill worth having. At StreamHPC we saw this coming in 2010 and have been training people in OpenCL since. A few weeks ago I got a question on how to take on OpenCL, which could be interesting for more people: how to take on OpenCL. In other words: the steps to take to learn OpenCL the quickest. Since the last time I wrote on learning OpenCL is almost two years ago, it is a good time to share more recent insights on this matter.

In “Separation of compute, control and transfer” I talked about node-wise programming as a method we should embrace instead of trying to unroll the existing loops. In this article I get into loops and discuss a few types and how they can be run in a parallel form. Dependency is the big variable in each type: the lower the dependency on previous iterations, the better it can be parallelised. Another one is the known iteration-dimensions known before the loop is started.

The more you think about it, the more you find that a loop is not a loop.

Continue reading “5 types of loops you should avoid” →

Say you have a device which is extremely good in numerical trigoniometrics (including integrals, transformations, etc to support mainly Fourier transforms) by using massive parallelism. You also have an optimised library which takes care of the transfer to the device and the handling of trigoniometric math.

Then you find out that the strength of your company is not the device alone, but also the powerful and easy-to-use library. You also find out that companies are willing to pay for the library, if it would work with other devices too. From your own helpdesk you hear that most questions are about extending the library with specialised functions. Giving this information, you define new customer groups for device-only and library-only – so just by adopting a standard you can increase revenue. Read below which steps you have to take to adopt OpenCL.

Continue reading “Supporting OpenCL on your own hardware” →

In the beginning of 2012 I spoke with Patrick Viry, former CEO of Ateji – now out-of-business. We shared ideas on GPGPU, OpenCL and programming in general. While talking about the strengths of his product, he came with a remark which I found important and interesting: separation of transfer. This triggered me to think further – those were the times when you could not read on modern computing, but had to define it yourself.

Separation of focus-areas are known to increase effectiveness, but are said to be for experts only. I disagree completely – the big languages just don’t have good support for defining the separations of concerns.

For example, the concepts of loops is well-known to all programmers, but OpenCL and CUDA have broken with that. Instead of using huge loops, those languages describe what has to be done at one location in the data and what the data is to be processed. From what I see, this new type of loop is getting abandoned in higher level languages, while it is a good design pattern.

I would like to discuss separation of compute and transfer from the rest of the code, to show that this will improve the quality of code. Continue reading “Separation of Compute and Transfer from the rest of the code.” →

There are two overviews I use during my training, and I would like to share with you. Normally I write them on a whiteboard, but it has advantages having it in a digital form.

Transfer speeds per bus

The below image gives an idea of theoretical transfer speeds, so you know how a fast network (1GB of data in 10 seconds) compares to GPU-memory (1GB of data in 0.01 seconds). It does not show all the ins and outs, but just give an idea how things compare. For instance it does not show that many cores on a GPU need to work together to get that maximum transfer rate. Also I have not used very precise benchmark-methods to come to these views.

We zoom into the slower bus-speeds. So all the good stuff is at the left and all buses to avoid are on the right.  What should be clear is that a read from or write to a SSD will make the software very slow if you use write-trough instead of write-back.

What is important to see that localisation of data makes a big difference. Take a look at the image and then try to follow with me. When using GPUs the following all can increase the speed on the same hardware: not using hard-disks in the computation-queue, avoiding transfers to and from the GPU and increasing the computations per byte of data. When an algorithm needs to do a lot of data-operations such as transposing a matrix, then it’s better to have a GPU that has high memory-access. When the number of operations is important, then clock-speed and cache-speed is most important.

Continue reading “Theoretical transfer speeds visualised” →

Does your computer have OpenCL-capable hardware? Read on and find out if your computer is compatible…

If you want to know what other non-PC hardware (phones, tablets, FPGAs, DSPs, etc) is running OpenCL, see the OpenCL SDK page.

For people who only want to run OpenCL-software and have recent hardware, just read this paragraph. If you have recent drivers for your GPU, you can be sure OpenCL is already supported and you can run OpenCL-capable software. NVidia has support for OpenCL 1.1 since drivers 280.13, so if you need OpenCL 1.1, then make sure you have this version or later. If you want to use Intel-processors and you don’t have an AMD GPU installed, you need to download the runtime of Intel OpenCL.

If you want to know if your X86 device is supported, you’ll find answers in this article.

Often it is not clear how OpenCL works on CPUs. If you have a 8 core processor with double threading, then it mostly is understood that 16 pipelines of instructions are possible. OpenCL takes care of this threading, but also uses parallelism provided by SSE and AVX extension. I talked more about this here and here. Meaning that an 8-core processor with AVX can compute 8 times 32 bytes (8*8 floats or 8*4 doubles) in parallel. You could see it as parallelism of parallelism. SSE is designed with multimedia-operations in mind, but has enough to be used with OpenCL. The minimum requirement for OpenCL-on-a-CPU is SSE 4.2, though.

A question I see often is what to do if you have more devices. There is no OpenCL-package for all the available devices, so you then need to install drivers for each device. CPU-drivers are often included in the GPU-drivers.

Read on to find out exactly which processors are supported.

Continue reading “Do your (X86) CPU and GPU support OpenCL?” →