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

Chapter 5. OpenCL Program and Kernel Objects

In the last two chapters we discussed about the OpenCL memory objects in the form of buffer and image objects. In the previously discussed examples of saxpy and histogram in first and the third chapter respectively; we implemented a parallel OpenCL C kernel, which is executed on a device. A program object and a kernel object were created before execution of the kernel. These kernel and program object are the important execution entities in the OpenCL framework. In this chapter we shall concentrate on the set up steps required to create a program object and execute a kernel. Once you have expertise in this then you can concentrate on the problem, which you want to solve using OpenCL. The following topics will be discussed in this chapter:

  • Creating program objects

  • Program build options

  • Querying program objects

  • Offline and online compilation

  • Creating kernel objects

  • Setting kernel arguments

  • Executing the kernels

  • Querying kernel objects

  • Source versus binary...