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 10. OpenCL-OpenGL Interoperation

In this chapter we will discuss OpenCL and OpenGL interoperation, which in its simple form means sharing of data between OpenGL and OpenCL in a program that uses both. Interoperation is commonly abbreviated as interop.

OpenGL was first released in January 1992 for proving graphics acceleration APIs. OpenCL was first released in December 2008 for accelerating general purpose computing. Both OpenCL and OpenGL use a GPU for their acceleration (OpenCL can use many other devices though). This OpenCL-GL Interoperation feature was introduced from the earliest version of OpenCL, that is, 1.0, but was really improved in OpenCL 1.1 by linking OpenCL and OpenGL events and efficient sharing of image and buffers. The computational part is done by OpenCL and graphics rendering is done by OpenGL without transferring data to and from host. This optimization in memory bandwidth should lead to an increase in efficiency and simplicity in coding.

In this chapter we first...