Phases

Since integrating OpenCL into existing software is not straightforward, we have four phases; each of which have their own time-schedule and benefits

1: exploration

In initial meetings, we (StreamHPC) and you (our customer) will discuss the bottle-necks in the software. As we believe the bottle-neck is related to computation-speed, we will continue with the next phase. Else, suggestions will be given on how to target the problem in another way. Our expertise can be used to have measurements done as a start for an alternative project.

If speed of computations are the bottle-neck and the theoretical minimal speed-up is promising, a project-team would formed.

2: research

In this step we will further investigate the possible methods of acceleration and visualize the current software-design. We make a plan in cooperation with the software architect to establish if and how OpenCL hardware acceleration can be integrated into the existing software. Costs and time depend on the (pre-)work done by your software team.

While nothing is produced, this is a very important phase. Every day progress is shared with the project-team and thus every day the project needs can be discussed and redesigned.

All information needed to finish the project would gathered at the end of this phase. After this, there will be a decision to make: go/no-go easy.

3: initial acceleration

A: isolated

Here we will target the theoretical minimal speed-up. Depending on the problem and the budget for this phase, this can be done in mathematics-software or in pure OpenCL.

B: integration

First, the hardware is chosen to run the OpenCL-code, then the code from the first part will be integrated into the software.

The speed-up will largely depend on the software it is built into and the hardware it is built on.

4: optimisation

When using standard techniques in OpenCL we get a minimum increase in computations-speed. By using specific hardware-optimisations and extra hardware, we can get extra speed-ups. If we think the speed-up will be marginal, we would suggest to skip this phase.

Since the hardware changes every year, we can make a 5-year plan to build a cluster. This increases in speed every year for a budget comparable to building a larger cluster at once. And this is comparably slow after 5 years.

SLA and risk-management

We are happy to serve your needs, but since we are not a large company we need to give securities in a different way:

• We can include a fall-back in case the code does not work as expected. The control is in the hands of the operator. Automatic fall-back is also possible when the input does not match certain pre-conditions. Note that not all software is ready for fall-back logic.
• Since GPGPU is rather new, many small OpenCL-companies throughout the world are in contact in case extra man-power is needed. StreamHPC is part of that network.
• We take documentation very serious; all our code is documented extensively. This way any other company can take over. And this is possible, since OpenCL-kernels are rather small.

Please contact us for more information and details.

Primary and secondary tasks

The main focus is programming and solving problems. But that means that everything that obstructs this focus, needs to be gotten out of the way. This is simpler on paper than in reality and therefore there are multiple “faiths” among company, how to do this.

We start with clearly distincting primary and secondary tasks, where the difference is that there needs to be more time spent on the primary tasks in the long term. The last part of the sentence is very important.

What we do every day and week:

• Planning
  • Write issues
  • Make issue estimations
  • Prioritize issues
  • Bundle issues in epics
  • Pick issues for personal weekly milestones
• Problem-solving
• Coding and math
• Learning
  • Reading books
  • Reading papers
  • Watching videos

Why so much emphasis on planning?

The planning-part takes good time, but refrains us from spending too much time on dead ends. And spending time on dead ends is not a primary task at all. Also planning helps with designing better strategies – there is limited time for solving problems and coding software, so doing a full-scope research is not going to work. As there is no way to efficiently build complex code without any time-estimations on the different approaches, planning-skills provide the necessary foundations for becoming a senior coder.

We start as early as possible to train these skills, so also juniors are asked to do all planning-tasks. Initially this takes a good part of the valuable coding-time but quickly goes down and first advantages are seen.

Style of project handling

Tools

We mostly use Gitlab and Mattermost to share code and have discussions. This makes it possible to keep good track of each project – searching for what somebody said or coded two years ago is quite easy. Using modern tools has changed the way we work a lot, thus we have questioned and optimized everything that was presented as “good practice”.

We continuously look into new tools that can help us improve. Also here the main focus is to reduce the time on secondary tasks, so we can spend more time thinking on problem-solving.

Pull-style project management

The tasks are written down by the team, using the project-doc as input. All these tasks are put into the task-list of the project and estimated. Then each team member picks the tasks that are a good fit. There are always tasks that need to be pushed instead of pulled, but luckily that’s a relatively small part of all work.

All code (MR) is checked by one or two colleagues, chosen by the one who wrote the code. More important are the discussions in advance, as the group can give more insight than any individual and one can get into the task well-prepared. The goal is not to get the job finished, but not having written the code where a future bug has been found.

All types of code can contain comments and Doxygen can create documentation automatically, so there is no need to copy functions into a Word-document. Log-style documentation was introduced, as git history and Doxygen don’t answer why a certain decision has been made. By writing down a logbook, a new member of the team can just read these remarks and fully understand why the architecture is how it is and what the limits are. We’ll discuss this in more detail later.

These type of solutions describe how we work and differ from a corporate environment: no-nonsense and effective.

The week

If you’d work here, how would your week look like the first year? Specifically saying the first year, as for more complex projects, different approaches could be chosen.

Monday weekly planning

Together with your team you pick up the issues for the week. The issues should have estimations, or these will be done during that meeting. When your week is filled, you know what to do.

Monday weekly meeting

Every Monday we have a weekly meeting to share with everybody how the other projects are doing.

Mon-Fri: Daily standup

Retrospective of the previous day, and tuning of the day ahead.

Practice:

• Tools
• C/C++
• GPGPU
• Scrum

Friday closing

Weekly retrospective, cleaning up, writing notes on issues, etc.

Weekly customer meetings

Here we discuss the progress and anything blocking. The customer shares their progress, and together problems can be solved.

Many projects have a shared (high-level) issue-list, so the progress is continuously synced with the customer and communication is easy.

There are not many companies like Stream HPC. Most others are or a government-institute for the national supercomputer, 1 or 2 freelancers or… actually not experienced with GPUs. So how did it start? How did we get a large team of HPC- and GPU-experts, working for customers worldwide?

Want to know more? Go to our contacts page and ask any question.

We currently have 6 months for onboarding. This helps you, as our new colleague, get used to the different environment, the company’s priorities and ways of working.

What requirements we signal before hiring

The self-assessment contains all the elements we try to foster. It shows 4 main areas:

• CPU programming & algorithms
• GPU programming & performance oriented programming
• Problem solving
• Collaboration, planning & prioritization

Each of these, and some personal skills, we discuss, improve and measure. Six months is never enough to improve on everything, but it is enough to focus on the items where most need to be done. It’s certainly enough time to understand what quality means and how to get there.

It’s easy to get confused about quality. Quality might mean deluxness, fanciness, expensiveness. That’s not what quality means. Quality means meeting spec. Keeping the promise. Doing exactly what you said you would do. It is measured in consistency.

Seth Godin

First week(s)

Getting started means you get everything on your desk at once. Best to have a checklist:

• Creation of accounts
• Ask questions you might have to your buddy.
• Introduction to others.
• Learning the basics of the development and collaboration environments
• Get necessary hardware, including noise-canceling headphones.
• Make technical contributions from the first day, as this provides:
  • Measurable contributions
  • Time management

What to expect in your first months

In your first weeks, you’ll ease into a project, pair up with a buddy, meet teammates (both in-office and remote), and get familiar with how we work, daily standups, time tracking, and internal tools like GitLab. You’ll also learn about our team culture, performance expectations, and key documents that shape how we collaborate. Regular check-ins at one, and five months help track your growth, gather feedback, and support your long-term development.

We are active in several foundations, communities and collaborations. Below is an overview.

Khronos

Associate member of Khronos, the non-profit technology consortium that maintains important languages like OpenCL, OpenGL, SPIR and Vulkan.

The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 to provide a structure for key industry players to cooperate in the creation of open standards that deliver on the promise of cross-platform technology. Today, Khronos is a not for profit, member-funded consortium dedicated to the creation of royalty-free open standards for graphics, parallel computing, vision processing, and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms from the desktop to embedded and safety critical devices.

High Tech NL

High Tech NL is the sector organization by and for innovative Dutch high-tech companies and knowledge institutes. High Tech NL is committed to the collective interests of the sector, with a focus on long-term innovation and international collaboration.

We’re a member because HighTech NL is one of the few organizations that understands IT is far more than digitisation. Our main focus there is robotics.

HSA Foundation

Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation is a not-for-profit industry standards body focused on making it dramatically easier to program heterogeneous computing devices. The consortium comprises various semiconductor companies, tools providers, software vendors, IP providers, and academic institutions that develops royalty-free standards and open-source software.

HiPEAC

HiPEAC’s mission is to steer and increase the European research in the area of high-performance and embedded computing systems, and stimulate (international) collaborations.

We’ve sponsored multiple conferences over the years.

ETP4HPC

ETP4HPC is the European Technology Platform (ETP) in the area of High-Performance Computing (HPC). It is an industry-led think-tank comprising of European HPC technology stakeholders: technology vendors, research centres and end-users. The main objective of ETP4HPC is to define research priorities and action plans in the area of HPC technology provision (i.e. the provision of supercomputing systems).

OpenPower

OpenPOWER Foundation is an open, not-for-profit technical membership group incorporated in December 2013. It was incepted to enable today’s data centers to rethink their approach to technology. OpenPOWER was created to develop a broad ecosystem of members that will create innovative and winning solutions based on POWER architecture.