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HPC centre EPCC says: “Better software, better science”

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

The University of Edinburgh houses the HPC centre EPCC. Neelofer Banglawala wrote about a programme which funds the development and improvement of scientific software, and also discussed about the results.

Many of the 10 most used application codes on ARCHER have been the focus of an eCSE project. Software with more modest user bases have improved user uptake and widened their impact through eCSE-funded work. Furthermore, performance improvements can lead to tens of thousands of pounds of savings in compute time.

Saving tens of thousands of pounds is certainly worth the investment. This also means more users can work on the same supercomputer, thus reducing waiting times. Continue reading “HPC centre EPCC says: “Better software, better science”” →

DOI: Digital attachments for Scientific Papers

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

Ever saw a claim on a paper you disagreed with or got triggered by, and then wanted to reproduce the experiment? Good luck finding the code and the data used in the experiments.

When we want to redo experiments of papers, it starts with finding the code and data used. A good start is Github or the homepage of the scientist. Also Gitlab. Bitbucket, SourceForge or the personal homepage of one of the researchers could be a place to look. Emailing the authors is often only an option, if the university homepage mentions such option – we’re not surprised to get no reaction at all. If all that doesn’t work, then implementing the pseudo-code and creating own data might be the only option – not if that will support the claims.

So what if scientific papers had an easy way to connect to digital objects like code and data?

Here the DOI comes in.

Continue reading “DOI: Digital attachments for Scientific Papers” →

How to speed up Excel in 6 steps

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

After the last post on Excel (“Accelerating an Excel Sheet with OpenCL“), there have been various request and discussions how we do “the miracle”. Short story: we only apply proper engineering tactics. Below I’ll explain how you can also speed up Excel and when you actually have to call us (last step).

A computer can handle 10s of gigabytes per second. Now look how big your Excel-sheet is and how much time it takes. Now you understand that the problem is probably not your computer.

Excel is a special piece of software from a developer’s perspective. An important rule of software engineering is to keep functionality (code) and data separate. Excel mixes these two as no other, which actually goes pretty well in many cases unless the data gets too big or the computations too heavy. In that case you’ve reached Excel’s limits and need to properly solve it.

An Excel-file often does things one-by-one, with a new command in every cell. This prevents any kind of automatic optimizations – besides that, Excel-sheets are very prone to errors.

Below are the steps to go through, of which most you can do yourself!

Continue reading “How to speed up Excel in 6 steps” →

Academic hackatons for Nvidia GPUs

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

Are you working with Nvidia GPUs in your research and wish Nvidia would support you as they used to 5 years ago? This is now done with hackatons, where you get one full week of support, to get your GPU-code improved and your CPU-code ported. Still you have to do it yourself, so it’s not comparable to services we provide.

To start, get your team on a decision to do this. It takes preparation and a clear formulation of what your goals are.

When and where?

It’s already April, so some hackatons have already taken place. For 2019, these are left where you can work on any language, from OpenMP to OpenCL and from OpenACC to CUDA. Python + CUDA-libraries is also no problem, as long as the focus is Nvidia.

Continue reading “Academic hackatons for Nvidia GPUs” →

Stream Team at ISC

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

This year we’ll be with 4 people at ISC: Vincent, Adel, Anna and Istvan. You can find us at booth G-812, next to Red Hat.

Booth G-812 is manned&womened by Stream HPC

While we got known in the HPC-world for our expertise on OpenCL, we now have many years of experience in CUDA and OpenMP. To get there, we’ve focused a lot on how to improve code quality of existing software, to reduce bugs and increase speedup-potential. Our main expertise remains full control over algorithms in software – the same data simply processed faster.

Why do we have a booth?

We’ll be mostly talking to (new) customers for development of high performance software for the big machines. Also we’ll have a list of our open job positions with us, and we can do the first introductory interview on the spot.

Our slogan for this year is:

There are a lot of supercomputers. Somebody has to program its software

We’ll be sharing our week on Twitter, so you can also see what we find: posters about HPC-programming on CPU and GPU, booths that have nice demos or interesting talks and ofcourse the surprises.

Let’s meet!

If you don’t have an appointment yet, but would like to chat with us, please contact us or drop by at our booth. As we’re with four people, we have high flexibility.

Improving FinanceBench

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

If you’re into computational finance, you might have heard of FinanceBench.

It’s a benchmark developed at the University of Deleware and is aimed at those who work with financial code to see how certain code paths can be targeted for accelerators. It utilizes the original QuantLib software framework and samples to port four existing applications for quantitative finance. It contains codes for Black-Scholes, Monte-Carlo, Bonds, and Repo financial applications which can be run on the CPU and GPU.

The problem is that it has not been maintained for 5 years and there were good improvement opportunities. Even though the paper was already written, we think it can still be of good use within computational finance. As we were seeking a way to make a demo for the financial industry that is not behind an NDA, this looked like the perfect starting point for that. We have emailed all the authors of the library, but unfortunately did not get any reply. As the code is provided under an permissive license, we could luckily go forward.

The first version of the code will be released on Github early next month. Below we discuss some design choices and preliminary results.

Continue reading “Improving FinanceBench” →

The Art of Benchmarking

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

How fast is your software? The simpler the software setup, the easier to answer this question. The more complex the software, the more the answer will “it depends”. But just peek at F1-racing – the answer will depend on the driver and the track.

This article focuses on the foundations of solid benchmarking, so it helps you to decide which discussions to have with your team. It is not the full book.

There will be multiple blog posts coming in this series, which will be linked at the end of the post when published.

The questions to ask

Even when it depends on various variables, answers do can be given. These answers are best be described as ‘insights’ and this blog is about that.

First the commercial message, so we can focus on the main subject. As benchmark-design is not always obvious, we help customers to set up a system that plugs into a continuous integration system and gives continuous insights. More about that in an upcoming blog.

We see benchmarking as providing insights in contrast with the stopwatch-number. Going back to F1 – being second in the race, means the team wants to probably know these:

  • What elements build up the race? From weather conditions to corners, and from other cars on the track to driver-responses
  • How can each of these elements be quantified?
  • How can each of these elements be measured for both own cars and other cars?
  • And as you guessed from the high-level result, the stopwatch: how much speedup is required in total and per round?
Continue reading “The Art of Benchmarking” →

Improving FinanceBench for GPUs Part II – low hanging fruit

Posted by Adel Johar on

We found a finance benchmark for GPUs and wanted to show we could speed its algorithms up. Like a lot!

Following the initial work done in porting the CUDA code to HIP (follow article link here), significant progress was made in tackling the low hanging fruits in the kernels and tackling any potential structural problems outside of the kernel.

Additionally, since the last article, we’ve been in touch with the authors of the original repository. They’ve even invited us to update their repository too. For now it will be on our repository only. We also learnt that the group’s lead, professor John Cavazos, passed away 2 years ago. We hope he would have liked that his work has been revived.

Link to the paper is here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2458523.2458536

Scott Grauer-Gray, William Killian, Robert Searles, and John Cavazos. 2013. Accelerating financial applications on the GPU. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on General Purpose Processor Using Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU-6). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 127–136. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2458523.2458536

Improving the basics

We could have chosen to rewrite the algorithms from scratch, but first we need to understand the algorithms better. Also, with the existing GPU-code we can quickly assess what are the problems of the algorithm, and see if we can get to high performance without too much effort. In this blog we show these steps.

Continue reading “Improving FinanceBench for GPUs Part II – low hanging fruit” →

Our offices

We’re expanding to more cities, to be closer to talent and our customers. The idea is to have multiple smaller offices instead of a few big ones. The idea for this was a simple set of questions on how work would be in 2030. The lines between offices would be shifting – not all is to be defined by walls. So smaller offices nearby, with the flexibility to temporarily move to another city, would be much more suited for what is expected in 2030.

Each city has one or two senior developer+manager person, who takes lead when the project-complexity demands it.

In HQ the main structure is provided for onboarding, administration, sales and such. All to make sure the different cities only have a few local things to take care off, so the focus can be on building great software and efficiently handling the projects.

EU – NL – Amsterdam

Koningin Wilhelminaplein 1 – 40601, 1062HG, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Amsterdam is the economic center of the Netherlands, a small country with 17 million inhabitants. It’s the home of HPC-companies like Bright Computing and ClusterVision, and has a large IT workforce that also feed the R&D demand of large international companies. As the number of companies settling here is still growing, Amsterdam is even planning to build a complete new city for 40 to 70 thousand people in the harbour area.

There are different sides of the city. When you think of Amsterdam as a tourist, you might think of the Anne Frank House, Gay Parade, Van Gogh Museum, the Red Light District, the canals, windmills and Tulips. If you would consider living here there are about the 180 different nationalities that live in the city, the 22 international schools and two universities, the vibrant night life and the many-villages-make-the-city atmosphere. Locals of all professions are fluent in English and there is a lively expat community.

You don’t need to live in Amsterdam, as there are several cities and villages nearby with all unique identities. As the Dutch infrastructure is of high standard, Amsterdam is easy to reach via train (and car) from several nearby cities and villages. For instance taking the train from Haarlem to the office takes 9 to 13 minutes, Leiden or Utrecht half an hour. Want to live at the sea? Zandvoort to the office is 25 minutes.

Expats (both single and with family) say they found it easy to build up a social life. For Europeans it’s very easy to move to Amsterdam, as there are no real borders in the EU.

EU – HU – Budapest

Radnóti Miklós u. 2, Budapest, 1137, Hungary

Two cities, Buda and Pest with both their own characteristics form the 1,75 million large capital of Hungary and the ninth-largest city in the EU. The country (est. in 895) has almost 10 million inhabitants.

There is more high-tech industry than you might think. Hungary has one of the highest rates of filed patents, the 6th highest ratio of high-tech and medium high-tech output in the total industrial output, the 12th-highest research Foreign Direct Investment inflow, placed 14th in research talent in business enterprise and has the 17th-best overall innovation efficiency ratio in the world.

If you walk in the city, you’ll find no average Hungarian. There is much creativity hidden and there’s a rich beer-culture. There is this unique quiet vibrant atmosphere that makes you immediately feel at home.

EU – ES – Barcelona

Better weather during winter than in Amsterdam and Budapest and a vibrant tech-city. It hosts the famous Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and is strong tech-hub.

Contenders

We’re researching multiple cities for starting a new office. Due to Covid these researches have been delayed a lot.

  • EU – NL – Utrecht
  • EU – NL – Eindhoven
  • EU – PL – Warsaw
  • EU – FR – Paris
  • EU – FR – Grenoble
  • EU – DE – Heidelberg
  • UK – Bristol

If you live in one of these cities and are good with GPUs, do get in contact. We start with these people:

  • An experienced developer who can manage projects
  • Three to four medior/senior developers
  • A temporary “location starter”
  • Optionally a sales-person

Optimized AI

At Stream HPC we optimize the performance of software such that data is processed in less time. For deep learning this is also important once the models have built. Optimizing a model algorithmically or find a new approach is fully in the domain of AI, but computationally optimizing the model’s throughput takes a specialism that can be found at Stream HPC.

We have built in-house tools and processes to find and solve compute bottlenecks in any type of software. One of these, benchmark.io, we are commercially selling. We also wrote foundational libraries for AMD GPUs that are used by software like TensorFlow and PyTorch, which means we are aware of how optimized each piece of library is – also for Nvidia’s version of the libraries.

Why performance is important

Your business-goals are implemented by your AI-models and software. If the models can be trained faster, if the inference can be done with less energy, if the training-costs go down, if more models can run at the same time – all these influence how well your business goals are attained.

The reason why we start offering this service is that progress in AI can be so opaque, such that “throwing more engineers at the problem” seems to become a solution where many AI-projects end. We think that control can be regained, by careful benchmarking and focusing on removing bottlenecks.

Would this work for you?

No AI is the same. We’d like to understand where your bottlenecks are. If compute optimizations are not the right direction for you, then we’ll advise you where to go next.

Contact us to initiate the conversation

Hello

Welcome to the webpage of Stream HPC. We’re a company in Europe that work on solving the most difficult HPC problems with emphasis on scaling to GPUs and clusters. We have built up experience in speeding up software, designing performance oriented architectures, writing maintainable low-level code, selecting the best hardware for the job, and building benchmarks. Above all, we’re a customer oriented company, as we want our clients to feel in control, while we do that heavy lifting.

The company is multi-cultural and designed to be a safe space for everybody of our team – from LBGT+ to Asperger’s, we focus on making our differences our strengths. As you can read in the job self-assessment, we have 4 main strengths:

  • CPU development: algorithms, low-level code, architectures for CPU-based software. This includes clusters.
  • GPU development: algorithms, low-level code, architectures for GPU-based software. This includes graphics programming
  • Problem-solving: get from full understanding to full exploration quickly.
  • Self-managed teams: we don’t hire managers, but provide frameworks.

Our customers are all around the world, but especially North-America, West-Europe and East-Asia. We have built many high performance software that run from edge-computers to super-computers. See “What we do” for examples.

Our offices are in:

  • Amsterdam
  • Budapest
  • Barcelona

If you want to know more, feel free to get in contact.

See this page for Netherlands/Belgium, Hungary or Spain.

Hallo Nederland/België!

Welkom op de webpagina van Stream HPC. Wij zijn een bedrijf in Europa dat werkt aan het oplossen van de moeilijkste HPC-problemen met de nadruk op schaalvergroting naar GPU’s en clusters. We hebben ervaring opgebouwd in het versnellen van software, het ontwerpen van prestatiegerichte architecturen, het schrijven van onderhoudbare low-level code, het selecteren van de beste hardware voor de taak en het bouwen van benchmarks. Bovenal zijn we een klantgericht bedrijf, omdat we willen dat onze klanten het gevoel hebben dat ze de touwtjes in handen hebben, terwijl wij dat zware werk doen.

Het bedrijf is multicultureel en ontworpen om een ​​veilige ruimte te zijn voor iedereen in ons team – van LBGT+ tot Asperger’s, we richten ons erop om van onze verschillen onze sterke punten te maken. Zoals je kunt lezen in de job self-assessment (EN), hebben we 4 sterke punten:

  • CPU-ontwikkeling: algoritmen, low-level code, architecturen voor CPU – gebaseerde software. Dit omvat clusters.
  • GPU-ontwikkeling: algoritmen, low-level code, architecturen voor GPU – gebaseerde software. Dit omvat grafische programmering
  • Probleemoplossing: ga snel van volledig begrip naar volledige verkenning.
  • Zelfsturende teams: wij huren geen managers in, maar geven kaders.

Onze klanten bevinden zich over de hele wereld, maar vooral in Noord-Amerika, West-Europa en Oost-Azië. We hebben veel hoogwaardige software gebouwd die loopt van edge-computers tot supercomputers. Zie “What we do (EN)” voor voorbeelden.

Onze kantoren zijn in:

  • Amsterdam
  • Boedapest
  • Barcelona

Wil je meer weten, neem dan gerust contact op.

Zie deze pagina voor internationaal, Hongarije of Spanje.

Events

Below is an overview of all upcoming events. For more information, contact us.

[eme_events]

Commodity and Open Standards – why OpenCL matters

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 1 Comment

V-UVThis article actually discusses the question: is GPGPU a solution for the masses, or is it for niche-products? For the latter open standards matter a lot less, as you will read.

If you watch the below video on sale&marketing by Victor Antonio, then you get what is so difficult about open standards: It pushes all companies using the standard into a focus on becoming the best. Indeed, survival of the fittest may be the base of (true) capitalism and giving the best products. Problem is that competition on price is not safe for the future of the company.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ5QmW3LfN4

The key is specialisation, or creating unique value. The below video discusses this. The difference between “a feature” and “unique value” is a discussion on its own, you really should have with your team on your own products. Continue reading “Commodity and Open Standards – why OpenCL matters” →

NVIDIA: mobile phones, tablets and HPC (cloud)

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on
If you want to see what is coming up in the market of consumer-technology (PC, mobile and tablet), then NVIDIA can tell you the most. The company is very flexible, and shows time after time it really knows in which markets is currently operates and can enter. I sometimes strongly disagree with their marketing, but watch them closely as they are in the most important markets to define the near future in: PCs, Mobile/Tablet and HPC.
You might think I completely miss interconnects (buses between processors, devices and memory) and memory-technologies as clouds have a large need for high-speed data-transport, but the last 20 years have shown that this is a quite stable developing market based on IP-selling to the hardware-vendors. With the acquisition of Cray’s interconnect technology, we have seen this is serious business for Intel, so things might change indeed. For this article I want to focus on NVIDIA’s choices.

Intel OpenCL CPU-drivers 2013 beta with OpenCL 1.2 support

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 7 Comments

Screenshot from Intel’s “God Rays” demo

This article is still work-in-progress

Intel has just released its OpenCL bit CPU-drivers, version 2013 bèta. It has support for OpenCL 1.1 (not 1.2 as for the CPU) on Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500 of the 3rd generation Core processors (Windows only). The release notes mention support for Windows 7 and 8, but the download-site only mentions windows 8. Support under Linux is limited to 64 bits.

The release notes mention:

  • General performance improvements for many OpenCL* kernels running on CPU.
  • Preview Tool: Kernel Builder (Windows)
  • Preview Feature: support of  kernel source code hotspots analysis with the Intel VTuneT Amplifier XE 2011 update 3 or higher.
  • The GNU Project Debugger (GDB) debugging support on Linux operating systems.
  • New OpenCL 1.2 extensions supported by the CPU device:
    • cl_khr_int64_base_atomics and cl_khr_int64_extended_atomics
    • cl_khr_fp16
    • cl_khr_gl_sharing
    • cl_khr_gl_event
    • cl_khr_d3d10_sharing
    • cl_khr_dx9_media_sharing
    • cl_khr_d3d11_sharing.
  • OpenCL 1.1 extensions that were changed in OpenCL 1.2:
    • Device Fission supports both OpenCL 1.1 EXT API’s and also OpenCL* 1.2 fission core features
    • Media Sharing support intel 1.1 media sharing extension and also the 1.2 KHR media sharing extension
    • Printf extension is aligned with OpenCL 1.2 core feature.

Check the release notes for full information.

The drivers can be found on http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/vcsource-tools-opencl-sdk-2013/. Installation is simple. For Windows there is a installer. If you have Linux, make sure you remove any previous version of Intel’s openCL drivers. If you have a Debian-based Linux, use the command ‘alien’ to convert the rpm to deb, and make sure ‘libnuma1‘ is installed. There are requirements for libc 2.11 or 2.12 – more information on that later as Ubuntu 12.04 has libc6 2.15.

Continue reading “Intel OpenCL CPU-drivers 2013 beta with OpenCL 1.2 support” →

Khronos Invites Press & Game Developers to Sessions @ GDC San Francisco

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

Khronos-meetup-march-SanFrancisco

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

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

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.

AMD gets into Machine Intelligence with “MI” range of hardware and software

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 1 Comment

Always good to have a share out of that curve.

In June we wrote on “AMD is back!“, where this is one of the blog posts with more details in a specific direction. This post is about AMD specifically targeting machine learning with the MI ( = Machine Intelligence) range of hardware and software.

With all the news around AMD’s new processors Ryzen (CPU) and VEGA (GPU), it became apparent that AMD wants a good share of the Deep Learning market.

And they seem to succeed. Here is the current status.

Hardware: 25 TFLOPS @ 16-bit

Recently released have been the “Radeon Instinct” series, which purely focus on compute. How the new naming of AMD is organised will be discussed in a separate blog post. Continue reading “AMD gets into Machine Intelligence with “MI” range of hardware and software” →

The rise of the GPGPU-compilers

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 6 Comments

Painting "High Rise" made by Huma Mulji
Painting “High Rise” made by Huma Mulji

If you read The Disasters of Visual Designer Tools you’ll find a common thought about easy programming: many programmers don’t learn the hard-to-grasp backgrounds any more, but twiddle around and click a program together. In the early days of BASIC, you could add Assembly-code to speed up calculations; you only needed tot understand registers, cache and other details of the CPU. The people who did that and learnt about hardware, can actually be considered better programmers than the C++ programmer who completely relies on the compiler’s intelligence. So never be happy if the control is taken out of your hands, because it only speeds up the easy parts. An important side-note is that recompiling easy readable code with a future compiler might give faster code than your optimised well-engineered code; it’s a careful trade-off.

Okay, let’s be honest: OpenCL is not easy fun. It is more a kind of readable Assembly than click-and-play programming. But, oh boy, you learn a lot from it! You learn architectures, capabilities of GPUs, special purpose processors and much more. As blogged before, OpenCL probably is going to be the hidden power for non-CPUs wrapped in something like OpenMP.

Continue reading “The rise of the GPGPU-compilers” →

To think about: an OpenCL Wizard

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

A part of reaction on my earlier post was “VB Programmers span the whole range from hobbyists to scientists and professions. There is no reason that VB programmers should be left out of the loop in GPU programming. (…) CUDA and OpenCL are fundamentally lower level languages that do not have the same level of user-friendlyness that VB gives, and so they require a bit more care to program. (…)“. By selecting parts, I probably put the emphasis very wrong, but it brought me an idea: “how a Visual Basic Wizzard for OpenCL” would look like.

It is actually very interesting to think how to get GPGPU-power to a programmer who’s used to “and then and then and then”; how do you get parallel processing into the mind of an iterative thinker? Simplification is not easy!

By thinking about an OpenCL-wizard, you start to understand the bottlenecks of, and need for OpenCL initialisation.

Actually it could better be built into an existing framework like OpenMP (or something alike in Python, Java, etc) or the IDE could give hints that the standard-function could be replaced by a GPGPU-version. But we just want a wizard which generates “My First OpenCL Program”, which puts a smile on the face of programmers who use their mouse a lot.

Continue reading “To think about: an OpenCL Wizard” →

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.

Continue reading “Thalesians talk – OpenCL in financial computations” →