OpenCL CPU/GPU Training (3 days)

Amsterdam, 17 Jan 2018

If you need to learn solid GPU programming, this is the training you should attend. This is a public training with trainees from various companies – get in contact if you want to learn more about our in-company trainings.

It includes:

Three days of training in Amsterdam, including coffee, tea, snacks, fruit, lunch and Friday-drinks,
Free code-review after the training.
1 month of email support.
Certificate.

Thew training is made more efficient than previous trainings, and now includes the code-review and email-support.

Schedule

Around 40% lectures, 50% lab-sessions and 10% discussions.

Important:

The training is guaranteed to take place. If you are the only one, you’ll simply get personal training.
The below schedule is indicative when it comes to lab-sessions – some lab-sessions can be (partly) skipped or replaced if time is getting too limited.

Day 1: OpenCL Foundations (For beginners only)

This is close to our standard OpenCL crash course. We start with the basic concepts, write our fist OpenCL program, discuss the architectures, discuss the difficulties of GPU-programming, compare to CUDA and C++, and end with writing simple code that runs on a laptop (CPU or GPU).

OpenCL model
OpenCL language
Memory objects
General hardware overview
Task-parallelism and data-parallelism
Mapping OpenCL to CPUs and GPUs
Comparison to CUDA

Day 2: Tools

There are various tools you need to understand to get code that runs well on GPUs. This day you will learn to use various vendor-provided and open source tools to help you analyse your code.

The tools are discussed and used along the following four subjects:

Software correctness: data-races.
Profiling: timing and finding hot-spots
Reporting: let tools create useful reports.
Debugging: finding bugs and learning what actually happens.

Day 3: Optimise a program from scratch

During the day, we will increase the level of requirements and touch all important aspects of OpenCL-programming.

As we have several GPU-servers available for developing, we can provide you with login-credentials, a git-account and a short how-to for using the extra GPUs from NVidia and AMD, optionally Intel. This way you can use different graphic cards to find out which optimisations work and don’t work.

Optimisations we discuss during this day:

Host-code
Data-flow
Memory handling
Data transfer speed increase
Memory alignments
Scheduling
Parallelism increase
Latency reduction
The most important kernel-optimisations from the different vendors

As each of these take about 3 hours, we try to already start on day two or continue on day five if needed.

Lab sessions

During the days we use various lab-sessions to support the explained theory.

Clinfo
ColorBalance
Matrix-multiplication
Convolution
Histogram
Contrast Stretching
Frame correlation
Fixing non-optimal and broken code

Prerequisites

We will send a questionnaire to understand the needs of each trainee. For larger groups, we also send a separate questionnaire to the representative.

Laptop

Attendees need to bring their own laptops for the lab sessions. The only requirement is for the laptops to be equipped with an OpenCL capable CPU or GPU and OpenCL drivers are correctly installed. A complete list with OpenCL compliant devices can be found here. Regarding the software, laptops need to have installed the following software:

cmake 3.1 or higher: lab-sessions are available in cmake, so almost all IDEs are supported.
An IDE or text-editor with coding-support.
One or more OpenCL SDKs, for each OpenCL-device in the computer.
A C/C++ compiler suite. Examples of supported suites are Microsoft Visual Studio, Apple Xcode and GNU GCC/G++. We will send a small project in advance, which can be used to test compilers.
ssh/putty: optional. Needed when working at StreamHPC’s GPU servers.
git: optional. Needed when easy transfer of lab-work between several computers/servers is required. Lab-sessions can also be downloaded as zip-files.

Skills

Attendees are required to have intermediate programming experience and good C/C++ knowledge. This means that you should at least be able to write an application in C/C++ from scratch, debug it with GDB and be very (!) comfortable working with pointers.

Info Amsterdam training

Costs

The costs are €3000. Extra days for personal training and consultancy are excluded – please ask us for a separate quote.

Nearby Hotels

At walking distance there are various hotels. In random order:

We have good experience with the Amsterdam ID Aparthotel, which is nearby, affordable and provides a kitchen in each room. Holiday Inn Express is next to the noisy railway station, so select only as last resort. There are three restaurants in the area, but many more in the city centre.

If you prefer a hotel in the city-center (central station is only 6 minutes by train) or want us to book one of the hotels, give a call to provide your preferences and payment details, and we’ll arrange everything for you. Costs for full handling is €100.

Reserve your spot today!

Email: info@streamhpc.com
Phone: +31 854865760

Events