Most of our projects are around performance optimisation, but we’re cleaning up bugs too. This is because you can only speed up software when certain types of bugs are cleared out. A few months ago, we got a different type of request. If we could solve bugs in MESA 3D that appear in games.

Yes, we wanted to try that and got a list of bugs to solve. And as you can read, we were successful.

Below you found a detailed description of one of the 5 bugs we solved by digging deep into the different games and the MESA 3D drivers. At the end of the blog post you’ll find the full list with links to issues in MESA’s bugtracker. Continue reading “Bug fixing the MESA 3D drivers” →

In the perfect world all software is fast, giving us time to do actual work. Unfortunately we live in an unperfect world, and we have to spend extra time controlling our anger as the software keeps us waiting.

Therefore we have opened the Slow Software Hotline – reachable via both phone and email. It has one goal: make you feel happy again.

Reporting is easy. Just name the commercial software that needs to be sped up and why. We’ll do the rest. If you need help with initial anger management due to the slow (and/or buggy) software, we’re happy to help with breathing practises.

Phone: +31 854865760

Email: hotline@streamhpc.com

We will not sit still until all software is fast. Speeding up all software out there. One at the time.

AMD open sourced the OpenCL driver stack for ROCm in the beginning of May. With this they kept their promise to open source (almost) everything. The hcc compiler was open sourced earlier, just like the kernel-driver and several other parts.

Why this is a big thing?
There are indeed several open source OpenCL implementations, but with one big difference: they’re secondary to the official compiler/driver. So implementations like PortableCL and Intel Beignet play catch-up. AMD’s open source implementations are primary.

It contains:

• OpenCL 1.2 compatible language runtime and compiler
• OpenCL 2.0 compatible kernel language support with OpenCL 1.2 compatible runtime
• Support for offline compilation right now – in-process/in-memory JIT compilation is to be added.

For testing the implementation, see Khronos OpenCL CTS framework or Phoronix openbenchmarking.org.

Why is it open sourced?

There are several reasons. AMD wants to stand out in HPC and therefore listened carefully to their customers, while taking good note on where HPC was going. Where open source used to be something not for businesses, it is now simply required to be commercially successful. Below are the most important answers to this question.

Give deeper understanding of how functions are implemented

It is very useful to understand how functions are implemented. For instance the difference between sin() and native_sin() can tell you a lot more on what’s best to use. It does not tell how the functions are implemented on the GPU, but does tell which GPU-functions are called.

Learning a new platform has never been so easy. Deep understanding is needed if you want to go beyond “it works”.

Debug software

When you are working on a large project and have to work with proprietary libraries, this is a typical delay factor. I think every software engineer has this experience that the library does not perform as was documented and work-arounds had to be created. Depending on the project and the library, it could take weeks of delay – only sarcasm can describe these situations, as the legal documents were often a lot better than the software documents. When the library was open source, the debugger could step in and give the “aha” that was needed to progress.

When working with drivers it’s about the same. GPU drivers and compilers are extremely complex and ofcourse your project hits that bug which nobody encountered before. Now all is open source, you can now step into the driver with the debugger. Moreover, the driver can be compiled with a fix instead of work-around.

Get bugs solved quicker

A trace now now include the driver-stack and the line-numbers. Even a suggestion for a fix can be given. This not only improves reproducibility, but reduces the time to get the fix for all steps. When a fix is suggested AMD only needs to test for regression to accept it. This makes the work for tools like CLsmith a lot easier.

Have “unimportant” specific improvements done

Say your software is important and in the spotlight, like Blender or the LuxMark benchmark, then you can expect your software gets attention in optimisations. For the rest of us, we have to hope our special code-constructions are alike one that is targeted. This results in many forums-comments and bug-reports being written, for which the compiler team does not have enough time. This is frustrating for both sides.

Now everybody can have their improvements submitted, giving it does not slow down the focus software ofcourse.

Get the feature set extended

Adding SPIR-V is easy now. The SPIRV-frontend needs to be added to ROCm and the right functions need to be added to the OpenCL driver. Unfortunately there is no support for OpenCL 2.x host-code yet – I understood by lack of demand.

For such extensions the AMD team needs to be consulted first, because this has implications on the test-suite.

Get support for complete new things

It takes a single person to make something completely new – this becomes a whole easier now.

More often there is opportunity in what is not there yet, and research needs to be done to break the chicken-egg. Optimised 128 bit computing? Easy complex numbers in OpenCL? Native support for Halide as an alternative to OpenCL? All high performance code is there for you.

Initiate alternative implementations (?)

Not a goal, but forks are coming for sure. For most forks the goals would be like the ones above, to later be merged with the master branch. There are a few forks that go their own direction – for now hard to predict where those will go.

Improve and increase university collaborations

If the software was protected, it was only possible under strict contracts to work on AMD’s compiler infrastructure. In the end it was easier to focus on the open source backends of LLVM than to go through the legal path.

Universities are very important to find unexpected opportunities, integrate the latest research in, bring potential new employees and do research collaborations. Added bonus for the students is that the GPUs might be allowed to used for games too.

Timour Paltashev (Senior manager, Radeon Technology Group, GPU architecture and global academic connections) can be reached via timour dot paltashev at amd dot com for more info.

Get better support in more Linux distributions

It’s easier to include open source drivers in Linux distributions. These OpenCL drivers do need a binary firmware (which were disassembled and seem to do as advertised), but the discussion is if this is part of the hardware or software to mark it as “libre”.

There are many obstacles to have ROCm complete stack included as the default, but with the current state it makes much more chance.

Performance

Phoronix has done some benchmarks on ROCm 1.4 OpenCL in January on several systems and now ROCm 1.5 OpenCL on a Radeon RX 470. Though the 1.5 benchmarks were more limited, the important conclusion is that the young compiler is now mostly on par with the closed source OpenCL implementation combined with the AMDGPU-drivers. Only Luxmark AMDGPU was (much) better. Same comparison for the old proprietary fgrlx drivers, which was fully optimised and the first goal to get even with. You’ll see that there will be another big step forward with ROCm 1.6 OpenCL.

Get started

You can find the build instructions here. Let us know in the comments what you’re going to do with it!

Last week AMD released ports of Caffe, Torch and (work-in-progress) MXnet, so these frameworks now work on AMD GPUs. With the Radeon MI6, MI8 MI25 (25 TFLOPS half precision) to be released soonish, it’s ofcourse simply needed to have software run on these high end GPUs.

The ports have been announced in December. You see the MI25 is about 1.45x faster then the Titan XP. With the release of three frameworks, current GPUs can now be benchmarked and compared.

Especially the expected good performance/price ratio will make this very interesting, especially on large installations. Another slide discussed which frameworks will be ported: Caffe, TensorFlow, Torch7, MxNet, CNTK, Chainer and Theano.

This leaves HIP-ports of TensorFlow, CNTK, Chainer and Theano still be released. Continue reading “Caffe and Torch7 ported to AMD GPUs, MXnet WIP” →

Since 2010 the name StreamComputing has been used and is widely known now in the GPU-computing industry. But the name has three problems: we don’t have the .com domain, it does not directly show what we do, and the name is quite long.

Some background on the old domain name

While the initial focus was Europe, for years our projects are done for 95% for customers outside the Netherlands and over 50% outside Europe – with the .eu domain we don’t show our current international focus.

But that’s not all. The name sticks well in academics, as they’re more used to have longer names – just try to read a book on chemistry. Names I tested as alternatives were not well-received for various reasons. Just like “fast” is associated with fast food, computing is not directly associated with HPC. So fast computing gets simply weird. Since several customers referred to us as Stream, it made much sense to keep that part of the name.

Not a new begin, but a more focused continuation

Stream HPC defines more what we are: we build HPC software. Stream HPC combines the well-known name combined with our diverse specialization.

• Programming GPUs with CUDA or OpenCL.
• Scaling code to multiple CPU and GPUs
• Creating AI-based software
• Speeding up code and optimizing for given architectures
• Code improvement
• Compiler tests and compiler building (LLVM)

With the HPC-focus we were more able to improve ourselves. We have put a lot of time in professionalizing our development-environment and project-management by implementing suggestions from current customers and our friends. We were already used to work fully independent and be self-managed, but now we were able to standardize more of it.

The rebranding process

Rebranding will take some time, as our logo and name is in many places. For the legal part we will take some more time, as we don’t want to get into problems with i.e. all the NDAs. Email will keep working on both domains.

We will contact all organizations we’re a member of over the coming weeks. You can also contact us, if you read this.

StreamComputing will never really go away. The name was with us for 7 years and stands for growing with the upcoming of GPU-computing.

The Khronos Group is the organization behind APIs like OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenCL. Over one hundred companies are a member and decide together what your next year phone, camera, computer or media device will be capable of.

We work most with OpenCL, but you probably noticed we work with OpenGL, Vulkan and SPIR too. Currently they have the following APIs:

• COLLADA, a file-format intended to facilitate interchange of 3D assets
• EGL, an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system
• glTF, a file format specification for 3D scenes and models
• OpenCL, a cross-platform computation API.
• OpenGL, a cross-platform computer graphics API
• OpenGL ES, a derivative of OpenGL for use on mobile and embedded systems, such as cell phones, portable gaming devices, and more
• OpenGL SC, a safety critical profile of OpenGL ES designed to meet the needs of the safety-critical market
• OpenKCam, Advanced Camera Control API
• OpenKODE, an API for providing abstracted, portable access to operating system resources such as file systems, networks and math libraries
• OpenMAX, a layered set of three programming interfaces of various abstraction levels, providing access to multimedia functionality
• OpenML, an API for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media
• OpenSL ES, an audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback
• OpenVG, an API for accelerating processing of 2D vector graphics
• OpenVX, Hardware acceleration API for Computer Vision applications and libraries
• OpenWF, APIs for 2D graphics composition and display control
• OpenXR, an open and royalty-free standard for virtual reality and augmented reality applications and devices
• SPIR, a intermediate compiler target for OpenCL and Vulkan
• StreamInput, an API for consistently handling input devices
• Vulkan, a low-overhead computer graphics API
• WebCL, a JavaScript binding to OpenCL within a browser
• WebGL, a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards

Too few people understand that the organization is very unique, as the biggest processor vendors are discussing collaborations and how to move the market, while they’re normally the fiercest competitors. Without Khronos it would have been a totally different world.

ROCm is AMD’s open source Linux-driver that brings compute to HSA-hardware. It does not provide graphics and therefore focuses on monitor-less applications like machine learning, math, media processing, machine vision, large scale simulations and more.

For those who do not know HSA, the Heterogeneous Software Architecture defines hardware and software such that different processor types (like CPU, GPU, DSP and FPGA) can seamlessly work together and have fine-grained memory sharing. Read more on HSA here.

About ROCm and it’s short history

The driver stack has been on Github for more than a year now. Development is done internally, while communication with users is done mostly via Gitlab’s issue tracker. ROCm 1.0 was publicly announced on 25 April 2016. After version 1.0, there now have been 6 releases in only one year – the 4 months of waiting time between 1.4 and 1.5 was therefore relatively long. You can certainly say the development is done at a high pace.

ROCm 1.4 was released end of December and besides a long list of fixed bugs, it had the developer preview of OpenCL 2.0 kernel support added. Support for OpenCL was limited to Fiji (R9 Fury series) and Baffin/Ellesmere (Radeon RX 400 series) GPUs, as these have the best HSA support of current GPU offerings.

Currently not all parts of the driver stack is open source, but the binary blobs will be open sourced eventually. You might think why a big corporation like AMD would open source such important part of their offering. This makes totally sense if you understand that their most important customers spend a lot of time on making the drivers and their code work together. By giving access to the code, debugging becomes a lot easier and will reduce development time. This will result in less bugs and a shorter time-to-market for the AMD-version of the software.

The OpenCL language runtime and compiler will be open sourced soon, so AMD offers full OpenCL without any binary blob.

What does ROCm 1.5 bring?

Version 1.5 adds improved support for OpenCL, where 1.4 only gave a developer preview. Both feature-support and performance have been improved. Just like in 1.4 there is support for OpenCL 2.0 kernels and OpenCL 1.2 host-code – the tool clinfo mentions there is even some support of 2.1 kernels, but we haven’t fully tested this yet.

The command-line based administration (ROCm-SMI) adds power monitoring, so power-efficiency can be measured.
The HCC compiler was upgraded to the latest CLANG/LLVM. There also have been big improvement in C++ compatibility.

Other improvements:

1. Added new API hipHccModuleLaunchKernel which works exactly as hipModuleLaunchKernel but takes OpenCL programming models launch parameters. And its test
2. Added new API hipMemPtrGetInfo
3. Added new field to hipDeviceProp_t -> gcnArch which returns 803, 700, 900, etc.,

Bug fixes:

1. Fixed Copyright and header names
2. Fixed issue with bit_extract sample
3. Enabled lgamma and lgammaf
4. Added guard for GFX8 specific intrinsics
5. Fixed few issues with operator overloading of vector data types
6. Fixed atanf
7. Added guard for __half data types to work with clang version more than 3. (Will be removed eventually).
8. Fixed 4_shfl to work only for gfx803 as hawaii don’t support permute ops

Current hardware support:

• GFX7: Radeon R9 290 4 GB, Radeon R9 290X 8 GB, Radeon R9 390 8 GB, Radeon R9 390X 8 GB, FirePro W9100 (16GB), FirePro S9150 (16 GB), and FirePro S9170 (32 GB).
• GFX8: Radeon RX 480, Radeon RX 470, Radeon RX 460, Radeon R9 Nano, Radeon R9 Fury, Radeon R9 Fury X, Radeon Pro WX7100, Radeon Pro WX5100, Radeon Pro WX4100, and FirePro S9300 x2.

If you’re buying new hardware, pick a GPU from the GFX8 list. FirePro S9300 X2 is currently the server-grade solution of choice.

Keep an eye on the Phoronix website, which is usually first with benchmarking AMD’s open source drivers.

Install ROCm 1.5

Where 1.4 had support for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04 and Fedora 23, 1.5 added support for Fedora 24 and dropped support for Ubuntu 14.04 and Fedora 23. On other distributions than Ubuntu 16.04 or Fedora 24 it *could* work, but there are zero guarantees.

Follow the instructions on Github step-by-step to get it installed via deb or rpm. Be sure to uninstall any previous release of ROCm to avoid problems.

The part on Grub might not be clear. For this release the magic GRUB_DEFAULT line on Ubuntu 16.04 is:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Advanced options for Ubuntu>Ubuntu, with Linux 4.9.0-kfd-compute-rocm-rel-1.5-76"

You need to alter this line with every update, else it’ll keep using the old version.

Make sure “/opt/rocm/bin/” is in your PATH when wanting to do some coding. When running the test, you should get:

/opt/rocm/hsa/sample$ sudo make
gcc -c -I/opt/rocm/include -o vector_copy.o vector_copy.c -std=c99
gcc -Wl,--unresolved-symbols=ignore-in-shared-libs vector_copy.o -L/opt/rocm/lib -lhsa-runtime64 -o vector_copy
/opt/rocm/hsa/sample$ ./vector_copy
Initializing the hsa runtime succeeded.
Checking finalizer 1.0 extension support succeeded.
Generating function table for finalizer succeeded.
Getting a gpu agent succeeded.
Querying the agent name succeeded.
The agent name is gfx803.
Querying the agent maximum queue size succeeded.
The maximum queue size is 131072.
Creating the queue succeeded.
"Obtaining machine model" succeeded.
"Getting agent profile" succeeded.
Create the program succeeded.
Adding the brig module to the program succeeded.
Query the agents isa succeeded.
Finalizing the program succeeded.
Destroying the program succeeded.
Create the executable succeeded.
Loading the code object succeeded.
Freeze the executable succeeded.
Extract the symbol from the executable succeeded.
Extracting the symbol from the executable succeeded.
Extracting the kernarg segment size from the executable succeeded.
Extracting the group segment size from the executable succeeded.
Extracting the private segment from the executable succeeded.
Creating a HSA signal succeeded.
Finding a fine grained memory region succeeded.
Allocating argument memory for input parameter succeeded.
Allocating argument memory for output parameter succeeded.
Finding a kernarg memory region succeeded.
Allocating kernel argument memory buffer succeeded.
Dispatching the kernel succeeded.
Passed validation.
Freeing kernel argument memory buffer succeeded.
Destroying the signal succeeded.
Destroying the executable succeeded.
Destroying the code object succeeded.
Destroying the queue succeeded.
Freeing in argument memory buffer succeeded.
Freeing out argument memory buffer succeeded.
Shutting down the runtime succeeded.

Also clinfo (installed from the default repo) should work.

Got it installed and tried your code? Did you see improvements? Share your experiences in the comments!

Not really ROCk-music, but this blog has been written while listening to the latest album of the Gorillaz

During IWOCL a workshop takes place that discusses the opportunities that C++ brings to OpenCL-enabled processors. A well-know example is SYCL, but various other approaches are talked about.

The Distributed & Heterogeneous Programming in C/C++ Workshop just released their program:

• HiHAT: A New Way Forward for Hierarchical Heterogeneous Asynchronous Tasking.
• SYCL C++17 and OpenCL interoperability experimentation with triSYCL.
• KART – A Runtime Compilation Library for Improving HPC Application Performance.
• Using SYCL as an Implementation Framework for HPX Compute.
• Adding OpenCL to Eigen with SYCL.
• SYCL-BLAS: Leveraging Expression Trees for Linear Algebra.
• Supporting Distributed and Heterogeneous Programming Models in ISO C++.
• Towards an Asynchronous Data Flow Model for SYCL 2.2.
• Communicating Execution Contexts using Channels.
• Towards a Unified Interface for Data Movement.
• Panel: What do you want in C++ for Heterogeneous.

As C++ is an important direction for OpenCL, we expect to see most of the discussions on programmability of OpenCL-enabled processors be done here.

The detailed program is to be released soon. For more information see the DHPCC++ webpage. At the IWOCL website you can buy tickets and passes – combining with IWOCL gives a discount.

As of 1 April we are 7 years old. Because of all the jokes on that day, this post is a bit later.

Let me take you through our journey how we grew up from a 1-person company to what we’re now. With pride I can say that (with ups and downs) StreamComputing (now rebranded to StreamHPC) has become a brand that equals to (extremely) fast software, HPC, GPUs and OpenCL.

7 years of changes

Different services

After 7 years it’s also time for changes. Initially we solely worked on OpenCL related services, mostly GPUs. And this is what we’re currently doing:

• HPC GPU computing: OpenCL, CUDA, ROCm.
• Embedded GPU computing: OpenCL, CUDA, RenderScript, Metal.
• Networked FPGA programming: OpenCL.
• GPU-drivers testing and optimisation.
• Software architecture optimisations.

While you see OpenCL a lot, our expertise in vendor-specific CUDA (NVidia), ROCm (AMD), RenderScript (Google) and Metal (Apple) cannot be ignored. Hence the “Performance Engineers” and not “GPU consultants” or “OpenCL programmers”.

From Fixers to Builders and getting new competition

Another change is that we have been going from fixing code afterwards to building software.

This has been a slow process and had to do with the confidence in performance engineering as an expert profession instead of a trick. We’re seeing new companies coming into the market and providing GPU-computing next to their usual services. This is a sign of the market growing up.

We’re confident in growing further in our market, as we have the expertise to design fast software while the newcomers have gained expertise to write code that runs on the GPU with only little speedup.

Community: OpenCL:PRO to OpenCL.org

There have been more times when we wanted to support the community more. The first try was OpenCL:PRO and did not live long, as it was actually unclear to us what “the community” wanted.

In the end it was not that hard. Everybody who starts with OpenCL has the same problems:

• Lack of convenience code, resulting in many, many wrappers and libraries that are incompatible.
• Lack of practice projects.
• Lack of overview on what’s available.

With OpenCL.org we aim to solve these problems together with the community. All is shared on Github and anybody can join to complete the information we’ve shared. While our homepage had around 40 pages on these subjects, it was only our personal view on the subjects or had outdated info.

So we’re going to donate most of the OpenCL-related technical pages we’ve written over the years to the community.

There is much more to share – watch our blog, the OpenCLorg twitter and newsletter!

Different Logo

For who remembered: in 2010 the logo looked quite different. We still use the blocks in the background (like on our Twitter account), but since 2014 the colours and font are quite different. This change has been going along with the company growing up. The old logo is careful, while the new one is bold – now we’re more confident about our expertise and value.

Over the past 3 years the new logo has stayed the same and has fully become our identity.

Same kind of customers

It has been quite a journey! We could not have done it without all the customers we served over those 7 years.

Thank you!

Several projects were introduced to us via the company’s GPU-pioneer. These collaborations were very successful and pleasant to do, due to the internal support within the company. This is a reason we would like to do more of these – this text is dedicated to the GPU-pioneers out there.

Seeing the potential of GPUs is not easy, even when you’ve carefully read the 13 types of algorithms that OpenCL can speed up. So it’s even harder to convince your boss that GPUs are the way to go.

Here is where we come in. This is what you need to do. Continue reading “Looking for the company’s GPU-pioneers” →

What brings 2017 in technology? Gartner gives their vision with the start of each year to give insight in which technologies to invest in. When looking through them, the most important enabling technologies are the GPU and Internet-of-Things (IoT) – see the image below. Whereas the last 4 are IoT based, the first 4 would not have been possible without GPUs.

The middle two are more mature technologies, as they’re based on technology progress of many years – it happens to be that the GPU has played a big role to get here. And ofcourse not only GPUs and IoT are the reason these 10 are on this year’s list.

Continue reading “GPUs and Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2017” →

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.
[mailchimpsf_form]

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.

[table id=8 /]

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” →