Khronos just sent out the below message to Press and Game Developers. To my understanding, there are many game devs under the readers of this blog, so I’d like you to share the message with you.

JOIN KHRONOS GROUP AT GDC 2014 SAN FRANCISCO
Press Conference, Technology Sessions and Refreshment OasisWe invite you to attend one or more of the Khronos sessions taking place in the Khronos meeting room just off the Moscone show floor. For detailed information on each session, and to register please visit: https://www.khronos.org/news/events/march-meetup-2014.

PRESS CONFERENCE

• WHEN: Wednesday March 19 at 10:00 AM (Reception 9:30 AM)
• WHERE: Room 262, West Mezzanine Level, (behind Official Press Room)
• GUESTS: Members of the Press and Industry by Invitation*
• RSVP: Jon Hirshon, Horizon PR jh@horizonpr.com

Members of the press are invited to attend the Khronos Press Conference, held jointly again this year with consortium PCGA (PC Gaming Alliance). Khronos will issue significant news on OpenGL ES, WebCL, OpenCL, and several more Khronos technologies, and PCGA will issue news about 2013 Gaming Market numbers. Updates will be delivered by Khronos and PCGA Executives, with insights made by David Cole of DFC and Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

DEVELOPER SESSIONS

• WHEN: Wednesday March 19 & Thursday March 20; Session Times Below
• WHERE: Room 262 – West Mezzanine Level, Moscone Center
• GUESTS: All GDC attendees**
• RSVP: https://www.khronos.org/news/events/march-meetup-2014

All GDC attendees** are invited to the Khronos Developer Sessions where experts from the Khronos Working Groups will deliver in-depth updates on the latest developments in graphics and media processing. These sessions are packed with information and provide a great opportunity to:

• Hear about the latest updates from the gurus that invented these technologies
• See leading-edge demos & applications
• Put your questions to members of the Khronos working groups
• Meet with other community members

SESSION SCHEDULE

Wednesday March 19

• 3:00 – 4:00 : OpenCL & SPIR
• 4:00 – 5:00 : OpenVX, Camera and StreamInput
• 5:00 – 6:00 : OpenGL ES
• 6:00 – 7:00 : OpenGL

Thursday March 20

• 3:00 – 3:50 : WebCL
• 4:00 – 4:50 : Collada and glTF
• 5:00 – 7:00 : WebGL

SESSION REGISTRATION
For information and to register, visit:https://www.khronos.org/news/events/march-meetup-2014

REFRESHMENT OASIS

• WHEN: Wednesday March 19 & Thursday March 20; from 10 AM to 7 PM
• WHERE: Room 270, West Mezzanine Level
• GUESTS: All GDC attendees**
• RSVP: https://www.khronos.org/news/events/march-meetup-2014

We thought “Refreshment Oasis” sounded like a nice way to say “sit down and have a cup of coffee while we keep working!”  Khronos is happy to offer a hospitality suite conveniently located next to our primary meeting room (and the official GDC Press room) to showcase Khronos Member technology demos and offer a place for GDC guests, Khronos Members and Marketing staff to meet.  You are welcome to just drop by for a chat, or please email Michelle@GoldStandardGroup.org to arrange a meeting with any Work Group Chairs, Khronos Execs or Marketing Team.

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

*Admittance to the Press Conference is open to all GDC registered Press, and to members of industry on a “Seating Available” basis.  Space is limited so reserve your seat today.

** Admittance to the KHRONOS sessions is FREE but: (1) all attendees must have a GDC Exhibitor or Conference Pass to gain entry to the Khronos meeting room area (GDC tickets details http://www.gdconf.com) and (2) all attendees MUST REGISTER for the individual Khronos API sessions. We expect demand to be high and space is limited.

With open standards becoming more important in the very diverse computer-game industry, Khronos is also growing. If you are in this industry  and want to know (or influence) the landscape for the coming years, you should attend.

We were too busy lately to tell you about it: OpenCL 2.0 is getting ready for prime time! As it makes use of the more recent hardware features, it’s therefore more powerful than OpenCL 1.x could ever be.

To get you up to speed, see this list of new OpenCL 2.0 features:

• Shared Virtual Memory: host and device kernels can directly share complex, pointer-containing data structures such as trees and linked lists, providing significant programming flexibility and eliminating costly data transfers between host and devices.
• Dynamic Parallelism: device kernels can enqueue kernels to the same device with no host interaction, enabling flexible work scheduling paradigms and avoiding the need to transfer execution control and data between the device and host, often significantly offloading host processor bottlenecks.
• Generic Address Space: functions can be written without specifying a named address space for arguments, especially useful for those arguments that are declared to be a pointer to a type, eliminating the need for multiple functions to be written for each named address space used in an application.
• Improved image support:  including sRGB images and 3D image writes, the ability for kernels to read from and write to the same image, and the creation of OpenCL images from a mip-mapped or a multi-sampled OpenGL texture for improved OpenGL interop.
• C11 Atomics: a subset of C11 atomics and synchronization operations to enable assignments in one work-item to be visible to other work-items in a work-group, across work-groups executing on a device or for sharing data between the OpenCL device and host.
• Pipes: memory objects that store data organized as a FIFO and OpenCL 2.0 provides built-in functions for kernels to read from or write to a pipe, providing straightforward programming of pipe data structures that can be highly optimized by OpenCL implementers.
• Android Installable Client Driver Extension: Enables OpenCL implementations to be discovered and loaded as a shared object on Android systems.

I could write many articles about the above subjects, but leave that for later. This article won’t get into these technical details, but more into what’s available from the vendors. So let’s see what toys we were given!

A note: don’t start with OpenCL 2.0 directly, if you don’t know the basic concepts of OpenCL. Continue reading “Overview of OpenCL 2.0 hardware support, samples, blogs and drivers” →

A while ago macresearch.com stopped from existing, as David Gohara pulled the plug. Luckily the sources of a very nice tutorial were not lost, and David gave us permission to share his material.

Even if you don’t have a MAC, then these almost 5 year old materials are very helpful to understand the basics (and more) of OpenCL.

We also have the sources (chapter 4, chapter 6) and the collection of corresponding PDFs for you. All material is copyright David Gahora. If you like his style, also check out his podcasts.

Introduction to OpenCL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc1-y1V1TPQ

OpenCL fundamentals

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrLqSgYyLQI

Building an OpenCL Project

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7QiD74kMvU

Memory layout and Access

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPE3ypaIEv4

Questions and Answers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rA6DypMsCU

Shared Memory Kernel Optimisation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFMPWuMso3Y

Did you like it? Do you have improvements on the code? Want us to share more material? Let us know in the comments, or contact us directly.

Want to learn more? Look in our knowledge base, or follow one of our  trainings.

Warning: below is raw material, and needs some editing.

Today there was quite some news around OpenCL, I’m afraid I can’t wait till later to have all news covered. Some news is unexpected, some is great. Let’s start with the great news, as the unexpected news needs some discussion.

Khronos released OpenCL 2.1 final specs

As of today you can download the header files and specs from https://www.khronos.org/opencl/. The biggest changes are:

• C++ kernels (still separate source files, which is to be tackled by SYCL)
• Subgroups are now a core functionality. This enables finer grain control of hardware threading.
• New function clCloneKernel enables copying of kernel objects and state for safe implementation of copy constructors in wrapper classes. Hear all Java and .NET folks cheer?
• Low-latency device timer queries for alignment of profiling data between device and host code.

OpenCL 2.1 will be supported by AMD. Intel was very loud with support when the provisional specs got released, but gave no comments today. Other vendors did not release an official statement.

Khronos released SPIR-V 1.0 final specs

SPIR-V 1.0 can represent the full capabilities of OpenCL 2.1 kernels.

This is very important! OpenCL is not the only language anymore that is seen as input for GPU-compilers. Neither is OpenCL hostcode the only API that can handle the compute shaders, as also Vulkan can do this. Lots of details still have to be seen, as not all SPIRV compilers will have full support for all OpenCL-related commands.

With the specs the following tools have been released:

• A bi-directional translator between LLVM to SPIR-V to enable flexible use of both intermediate languages in tool chains.
• An OpenCL C to LLVM compiler that generates SPIR-V through the above translator, as Clang can compile OpenCL 1.2/2.0 C kernels.
• A SPIR-V assembler and disassembler.

SPIRV will make many frontends possible, giving co-processor powers to every programming language that exists. I will blog more about SPIRV possibilities the coming year.

Intel claims OpenMP is up to 10x faster than OpenCL

The below image appeared on Twitter, claiming that OpenMP was much faster than OpenCL. Some discussion later, we could conclude they compared apples and oranges. We’re happy to peer-review the results, putting the claims in a full perspective where MKL and operation mode is mentioned. Unfortunately they did not react, as <sarcasm>we will be very happy to admit that for the first time in history a directive language is faster than an explicit language – finally we have magic!</sarcasm>

https://twitter.com/StreamHPC/status/666178711549583364

We get back later this week on Intel and their upcoming Xeon+FPGA chip, if OpenCL is the best language for that job. It ofcourse is possible that they try to run OpenMP on the FPGA, but then this would be big surprise. Truth is that Intel doesn’t like this powerful open standard intruding the HPC market, where they have a monopoly.

AMD claims OpenCL is hardly used in HPC

Well, this is one of those claims that they did not really think through. OpenCL is used in HPC quite a lot, but mostly on NVidia hardware. Why not just CUDA there? Well, there is demand for OpenCL for several reasons:

• Avoid vendor lock-in.
• Making code work on more hardware.
• General interest in co-processors, not specific one brand.
• Initial code is being developed on different hardware.
• …

Thing is that NVidia did a superb job in getting their processors in supercomputers and clouds. So OpenCL is mostly run on NVidia hardware and a therefore the biggest reason why that company is so successful in slowing the advancement of the standard by rolling out upgrades 4 years later. Even though I tried to get the story out, NVidia is not eager to tell the beautiful love story between OpenCL and the NVidia co-processor, as the latter has CUDA as its wife.

Also at HPC sites with Intel XeonPhi gets OpenCL love. Same here: Intel prefers to tell about their OpenMP instead of OpenCL.

AMD has few HPC sites and indeed there is where OpenCL is used.

No, we’re not happy that AMD tells such things, only to promote its own new languages.

CUDA goes AMD and open source

AMD now supports CUDA! The details: they have made a tool that can compile CUDA to “HiP” – HiP is a new language without much details at the moment. Yes, I have the same questions as you are asking now.

Also Google joined in and showed progress on their open source implementation of CUDA. Phoronix is currently the best source for this initative and today they shared a story with a link to slides from Google on the project. the results are great up: “it is to 51% faster on internal end-to-end benchmarks, on par with open-source benchmarks, compile time is 8% faster on average and 2.4x faster for pathological compilations compared to NVIDIA’s official CUDA compiler (NVCC)”.

For compiling CUDA in LLVM you need three parts:

• a pre-processor that works around the non-standard <<<…>>> notation and splits off the kernels.
• a source-to-source compiler for the kernels.
• an bridge between the CUDA API and another API, like OpenCL.

Google has done most of this and now focuses mostly on performance. The OpenCL community can use this to use this project to make a complete CUDA-to-SPIRV compiler and use the rest to improve POCL.

Khronos gets a more open homepage

Starting today you can help keeping the Khronos webpage more up-to-date. Just put a pull request at https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Khronosdotorg and wait until it gets accepted. This should help the pages be more up-to-date, as you can now improve the webpages in more ways.

More news?

AMD released HCC, a C++ language with OpenMP built-in that doesn’t compile to SPIRV.

There have been tutorials and talks on OpenCL, which I should have shared with you earlier.

Tomorrow another post with more news. If I forgot something on Sunday or Monday, I’ll add it here.

OpenCL SPIR (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) is an intermediate representation for OpenCL-code, comparable to LLVM IL and HSAIL. It is a search for what would be a good representation, such that parallel software runs well on all kinds of accelerators. LLVM IL is too general, but SPIR is a subset of it. I’ll discuss HSAIL, on where it differs from SPIR – I thought SPIR was a better way to start introducing these. In my next article I’d like to give you an overview of the whole ecosphere around OpenCL (including SPIR and HSAIL), to give you an understanding what it all means and where we’re going to, and why.

Know that the new SPIR-V is something completely different in implementation, and we are only discussing the old SPIR here.

[raw]

__kernel void sum(const int size, __global float * vec1, __global float * vec2){
  int ii = get_global_id(0);

  if(ii < size) vec2[ii] += vec1[ii];

}

[/raw]

In many hard sciences focus is on formulas and text, whereas images are mainly graphs or simplified representations of researched matters. Beautiful visualisations are mainly artist’s impressions in popular media targeting hobby-scientists. When Cyrille Favreau made the first good-working version of his real-time GPU-accelerated raytracer, he saw potential in exactly this area: beautiful, realistic visualisations to be used in serious science. This resulted in software called IPV.

He chose to focus on rendering molecules of proteins and this article discusses raytracing in molecular sciences, while highlighting the features of the software.

This project has been discussed on GPU Science, but this article looks at the the software from a slightly different perspective. If you don’t want to know how the software works and what it can do, scroll down for a download-link.

Continue reading “Scientific Visualisation of Molecules” →

In January 2010 I created the first steps of StreamComputing (redacted: rebranded to StreamHPC in 2017), by registering the website and writing a hello-world article. About 4 months of preparations and paperwork later the freelance-company was registered. Then 5 years later it got turned into a small company with still the strong focus on OpenCL, but with more employees and more customers.

I would like to thank the following people:

• My parents and grand-mother for (financially) supporting me, even though they did not always understand why I was taking all those risks.
• My friends, for understanding I needed to work in the weekends and evenings.
• My good friend Laura for supporting me during the hard times of 2011 and 2012.
• My girlfriend Elena for always being there for me.
• My colleagues and OpenCL-experts Anca, Teemu and Oscar, who have done the real work the past year.
• My customers for believing in OpenCL and trusting StreamComputing.

Without them, the company would never even existed. Thank you! Continue reading “StreamComputing exists 5 years!” →

Why you should just delve into porting difficult puzzles using the GPU, to learn GPGPU-languages like CUDA, HIP, SYCL, Metal or OpenCL. And if you did not pick one, why not N-Queens? N-Queens is a truly fun puzzle to work on, and I am looking forward to learning about better approaches via the comments.

We love it when junior applicants have a personal project to show, even if it’s unfinished. As it can be scary to share such unfinished project, I’ll go first.

Introduction in 2023

Everybody who starts in GPGPU, has this moment that they feel great about the progress and speedup, but then suddenly get totally overwhelmed by the endless paths to more optimizations. And ofcourse 90% of the potential optimizations don’t work well – it takes many years of experience (and mentors in the team) to excel at it. This was also a main reason why I like GPGPU so much: it remains difficult for a long time, and it never bores. My personal project where I had this overwhelmed+underwhelmed feeling, was with N-Queens – till then I could solve the problems in front of me.

I worked on this backtracking problem as a personal fun-project in the early days of the company (2011?), and decided to blog about it in 2016. But before publishing I thought the story was not ready to be shared, as I changed the way I coded, learned so many more optimization techniques, and (like many programmers) thought the code needed a full rewrite. Meanwhile I had to focus much more on building the company, and also my colleagues got better at GPGPU-coding than me – this didn’t change in the years after, and I’m the dumbest coder in the room now.

Today I decided to just share what I wrote down in 2011 and 2016, and for now focus on fixing the text and links. As the code was written in Aparapi and not pure OpenCL, it would take some good effort to make it available – I decided not to do that, to prevent postponing it even further. Luckily somebody on this same planet had about the same approaches as I had (plus more), and actually finished the implementation – scroll down to the end, if you don’t care about approaches and just want the code.

Note that when I worked on the problem, I used an AMD Radeon GPU and OpenCL. Tools from AMD were hardly there, so you might find a remark that did not age well.

Introduction in 2016

What do 1, 0, 0, 2, 10, 4, 40, 92, 352, 724, 2680, 14200, 73712, 365596, 2279184, 14772512, 95815104, 666090624, 4968057848, 39029188884, 314666222712, 2691008701644, 24233937684440, 227514171973736, 2207893435808352 and 22317699616364044 have to do with each other? They are the first 26 solutions of the N-Queens problem. Even if you are not interested in GPGPU (OpenCL, CUDA), this article should give you some background of this interesting puzzle.

An existing N-Queen implementation in OpenCL took N=17 took 2.89 seconds on my GPU, while Nvidia-hardware took half. I knew it did not use the full potential of the used GPU, because bitcoin-mining dropped to 55% and not to 0%. 🙂 I only had to find those optimizations be redoing the port from another angle.

This article was written while I programmed (as a journal), so you see which questions I asked myself to get to the solution. I hope this also gives some insight on how I work and the hard part of the job is that most of the energy goes into resultless preparations.

Two months ago I wrote about the FirePro S9000 – AMD’s answer to the K10 – and was already looking forward to this K20. Where in the gaming world, it hardly matters what card you buy to get good gaming performance, in the compute-world it does. AMD presented 3.230 TFLOPS with 6GB of memory, and now we are going to see what the K20 can do.

The K20 is very different from its predecessor, the K10. Biggest difference is the difference between the number of double precision capability and this card being more powerful using a single GPU. To keep power-usage low, it is clocked at only 705MHz compared to 1GHz of the K10. I could not find information of the memory-bandwidth.

ECC is turned on by default, hence you see it presented having 5GB. No information yet if this card also has ECC on the local memories/caches.

Continue reading “NVIDIA’s answer to FirePro S9000: the TESLA K20” →