ImageJ and OpenCL

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on 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.

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Thalesians talk – OpenCL in financial computations

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 1 Comment

End of October I had a talk for the Thalesians, a group that organises different kind of talks for people working or interested in the financial market. If you live in London, I would certainly recommend you visit one of their talks. But from a personal perspective I had a difficult task: how to make a very diverse public happy? The talks I gave in the past were for a more homogeneous and known public, and now I did not know at all what the level of OpenCL-programming was of the attendants. I chose to give an overview and reserve time for questions.

After starting with some honest remarks about my understanding of the British accent and that I will kill my business for being honest with them, I spoke about 5 subjects. Some of them you might have read here, but not all. You can download the sheets [PDF] via this link: Vincent.Hindriksen.20101027-Thalesians. The below text is to make the sheets more clear, but certainly is not the complete talk. So if you have the feeling I skipped a lot of text, your feeling is right.

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SUN jumping on the OpenCL-train?

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

Edit (27 May 2010): until now Oracle/SUN has not shown anything that would validate this rumour, and the job-posting is not there anymore. Follow us on Twitter to be the first to know if Oracle/SUN will have better support for GPGPU for Solaris and/or Java and/or its hardware.

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Job Description: The Power to change your world begins with your work at Sun!
This is a software staff engineering position requiring the ability to design, test, implement and maintain innovative and advanced graphics software. The person in this role is expected to identify areas for improvement and modification of Sun’s platform products and contribute to Sun’s overall product strategy. This person will work closely with others within the team and, as required, across teams to accomplish project objectives. May assume a leadership role in projects, including such activities as leading projects, participator in product planning and technology evaluation and related activities. May use technical leadership and influence to negotiate product design features or applications, both internally, and with open source groups as needed.
Requirements: * Excellent problem solving, critical thinking, and communication
skills
* Excellent knowledge of the C/C++ and Java programming languages
* Thorough working knowledge of 3D graphics, GPU architecture, and
3D APIs, such as OpenGL & Direct3D
* Thorough working knowledge of shader-level languages such as
GLSL, HLSL, and/or Cg
* Experience designing cross-platform, public APIs for developers
(Windows/MacOS/Linux)
* Experience with multi-threaded programming and debugging techniques
* Experience with operating systems level engineering
* Experience with performance profiling, analysis, and optimization
Education and Experience: Univ degree in computer sciene or engineering plus 5 years direct experience

In other words, a specialist in everything graphics-cards and Java, in a completely new area. Since OpenGL is a already known area not needing such a specialist for, there is a very good chance it will target OpenCL. A good choice.

Sun has all reasons to jump the train with Java, since Microsoft is already integrating loads of OpenCL-tools into its Visual Studio product (created by AMD and nVidia). Java has still more than 3 times the market share than C#, but with this late jump the gap will be closer in favour of Microsoft. Remember C# can easily call C-functions (which is the language OpenCL is written in); Java has a far more difficult task when it comes to calling C-functions without hazards, which is sort of implemented here and here. If OpenCL would not be implemented by Java, C, C++ and C# will make a jump a hole in Java’s share.

Besides Java, also Sun’s super-multi-threaded Sparc-servers will be in trouble since the graphic-cards of nVidia and AMD are now serious competitors. There is no official support of Sparc-processors for OpenCL, wile AMD has included X86-support and IBM PowerPC-support (also working on Cell) a few months ago.

Then we have the databases Oracle and MySQL; Oracle depends on Java a lot. While we see experiments speeding up competitor PostgreSQL with GPU-power, Oracle might become the slow turtle in a GPU-ruled database-world. MySQL has the same development-speed and also “bleeding edge” releases, but Oracle might slow down its official support. Expect Microsoft to have SQL-server fully loaded in its next major release.

If Oracle/Sun jumped the train today, expect no OpenCL-products from Oracle/Sun before Q2-2011.