Book Image

OpenCL Programming by Example

Book Image

OpenCL Programming by Example

Overview of this book

Research in parallel programming has been a mainstream topic for a decade, and will continue to be so for many decades to come. Many parallel programming standards and frameworks exist, but only take into account one type of hardware architecture. Today computing platforms come with many heterogeneous devices. OpenCL provides royalty free standard to program heterogeneous hardware. This guide offers you a compact coverage of all the major topics of OpenCL programming. It explains optimization techniques and strategies in-depth, using illustrative examples and also provides case studies from diverse fields. Beginners and advanced application developers will find this book very useful. Beginning with the discussion of the OpenCL models, this book explores their architectural view, programming interfaces and primitives. It slowly demystifies the process of identifying the data and task parallelism in diverse algorithms. It presents examples from different domains to show how the problems within different domains can be solved more efficiently using OpenCL. You will learn about parallel sorting, histogram generation, JPEG compression, linear and parabolic regression and k-nearest neighborhood, a clustering algorithm in pattern recognition. Following on from this, optimization strategies are explained with matrix multiplication examples. You will also learn how to do an interoperation of OpenGL and OpenCL. "OpenCL Programming by Example" explains OpenCL in the simplest possible language, which beginners will find it easy to understand. Developers and programmers from different domains who want to achieve acceleration for their applications will find this book very useful.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
OpenCL Programming by Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Defining Interoperation


Interoperation is a feature that allows an application to share data between OpenCL and OpenGL, without explicitly copying. Precisely, OpenCL-OpenGL interoperation means creating OpenCL memory objects directly from the existing OpenGL data structure without transferring data through the CPU. This saves a lot of data transfer time. It also saves memory in the GPU and solves the problem of data management, since the same data is being used by both OpenGL and OpenCL.

OpenCL applications can access data from two possible objects. They are as follows:

  • Image Object

  • Buffer Object

On the other hand an OpenGL program can share data with OpenCL with three possible objects. They are as follows:

  • Vertex Buffer Object (VBO)

  • Texture Object

  • RenderBuffer Object

The OpenGL Vertex buffer object can be linked to the OpenCL buffer object, as in the following figure:

Similarly the OpenGL the texture or render buffer object can be linked to the OpenCL image, as in the following figure:

Which kind...