We’re currently very busy writing down our projects of the past 5+ years, so you have a better idea what we can do.
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The Fastest Payroll System Of The World
At StreamHPC we do several very different types of projects, but this project has been very, very different. In the first place, it was nowhere close to scientific simulation or media processing. Our client, Intersoft solutions, asked us to speed up thousands of payroll calculations on a GPU. They wanted to solve a simple problem, avoiding slow conversations with HR of large companies: Yes, I can answer your questions. For that I need to do a test-run. Please come back tomorrow. The calculation of 1600 payslips took one hour. This means 10,000 employees would take over 6 hours. Potential customers…
We accelerated the OpenCL backend of pyPaSWAS sequence aligner
Last year we accelerated the OpenCL-code in PaSWAS, which is open source software to do DNA/RNA/protein sequence alignment and trimming. It has users world-wide in universities, research groups and industry. Below you’ll find the benchmark results of our acceleration work. You can also test out yourself, as the code is public. In the readme-file you can learn more about the idea of the software. Lots of background information is described in these two papers: Flexible, Fast and Accurate Sequence Alignment Profiling on GPGPU with PaSWAS pyPaSWAS: Python-based multi-core CPU and GPU sequence alignment We chose PaSWAS because we really like…
Bug fixing the MESA 3D drivers
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…
We have been awarded the Khronos project to upgrade the OpenCL test suite to 2.2!
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…
Porting Manchester’s UNIFAC to OpenCL@XeonPhi: 160x speedup
As we cannot use the performance results for most of our commercial projects because they contain sensitive data, we were happy that Dr. David Topping from the University of Manchester was so kind to allow us to share the data for the UNIFAC project. The goal for this project was simple: port the UNIFAC algorithm to the Intel XeonPhi using OpenCL. We got a total of 485x speedup: 3.0x for going from single-core to multi-core CPU, 53.9x for implementing algorithmic, low-level improvements and a new memory layout design, and 3.0x for using the XeonPhi via OpenCL. To remain fair, we used the 160x speedup from…
We ported GROMACS from CUDA to OpenCL
GROMACS is an important molecular simulation kit, which can do all kinds of “soft matter” simulations like nanotubes, polymer chemistry, zeolites, adsorption studies, proteins, etc. It is being used by researches worldwide and is one of the bigger bio-informatics softwares around. To speed up the computations, GPUs can be used. The big problem is that only NVIDIA GPU could be used, as CUDA was used. To make it possible to use other accelerators, we ported it to OpenCL. It took several months with a small team to get to the alpha-release, and now I’m happy to present it to you. For…