OpenCL on CPU and GPU

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Introduction

OpenCL is a standard which defines a framework, an API and a programming language for parallel computation on heterogeneous systems like desktop computers, high-performance computing servers as well as hand-held devices.

The standard is maintained by the Khronos Group and supported by a large consortium of industry leaders including Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and ARM. Influenced by NVIDIA’s CUDA from the GPU side and by OpenMP which originates from the classical CPU side, the open OpenCL standard is characterized by a formulation which is abstract enough to support both CPU and GPU computing resources.

This is an ambitious goal, since providing an abstract interface together with a peak performance is a challenging task. OpenCL employs a strict isolation of the computation work into fundamental units, the kernels. These kernels can be developed in the OpenCL C programming language, a subset of the C99 language, with some additional OpenCL specific keywords.

In general, these kernels are hardware independent and compiled by the OpenCL runtime when they are loaded. To be able to fully exploit the parallel execution of the kernel code, several kernel instances, the work items, are started to process a set of input values. The actual number of concurrently running work items is determined by the OpenCL system. How a concrete algorithm can be partitioned into work items has to be decided by the programmer.

Reference Material

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