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

OpenCL ICD


The OpenCL function clGetPlatformIDs is used to determine the different OpenCL implementations available in the platform. There can be multiple OpenCL implementations installed in the system. Let's define an OpenCL platform.

An OpenCL platform is a host computing machine and a collection of heterogeneous devices managed by OpenCL implementations, which allow an application to share hardware resources and execute kernels on different devices in the platform. Devices from different vendors will have their own OpenCL runtimes in the platform. Let's consider a system with an AMD graphics card and an NVIDIA graphics card. Now an AMD OpenCL implementation is not going to work on NVIDIA OpenCL devices. Remember only the code is portable not the underlying OpenCL runtime. So how does an application solve this problem of using the multiple OpenCL runtimes or use multiple platforms. The answer is OpenCL ICD.

What is an OpenCL ICD?

The OpenCL Installable Client Driver (ICD) is a means of allowing...