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

Platform model


In heterogeneous computing, knowledge about the architecture of the targeted device is critical to reap the full benefits of the hardware. We had discussed the hardware architectures from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA in Chapter 1, Hello OpenCL. Though we will briefly discuss about the hardware from different vendors, we suggest you to take a deeper look at the underlying platform on which you will be working. In this section we will describe the OpenCL Platform model and map the AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel hardware architectures to the OpenCL Platform definitions.

OpenCL platform model, Courtesy Khronos

An OpenCL Platform model consists of a host connected to one or more devices like CPU's, GPU's or hardware accelerators like DSP's. Each OpenCL device consists of one or more compute units, which in turn is further divided into one-to-many processing elements. Computations on a device that is the actual kernel (work item) execution occurs within these processing elements. We just coined...