Advanced Hands-On OpenCL Tutorial To Kick-Off IWOCL 2016

Registration is now open for the Advanced Hands-On OpenCL Tutorial at the IWOCL 2016 conferernce. The tutorial focuses on advanced OpenCL concepts and is an extension of the highly successful “Hands on OpenCL” course which has received over 6,500 downloads from GitHub. Simon McIntosh-Smith, Associate Professor in High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol and one of the tutorial authors will lead the sessions.

OpenMP and OpenCL on Intel Xeon Phi

“In a heterogeneous system that combines both the Intel Xeon CPU and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, there are various options available to optimize applications. Whether one has an advantage over another is somewhat dependent on the application that is being run. Comparisons can be made comparing the two methods, as long as the algorithm lends itself to run and take advantage of either OpenMP or OpenCL.”

Video: Oclgrind – An Extensible OpenCL Device Simulator

“We describe Oclgrind, a platform designed to enable the creation of developer tools for analysis and debugging of OpenCL programs. Oclgrind simulates how OpenCL kernels execute with respect to the OpenCL standard, adhering to the execution and memory models that it defines. A simple plugin interface allows developer tools to observe the simulation and collect execution information to provide useful analysis, or catch bugs that would be otherwise difficult to spot when running the application on a real device. We give details about the implementation of the simulator, and describe how it can be extended with plugins that provide useful developer tools. We also present several example use-cases that have already been created using this platform, motivated by real-world problems that OpenCL developers face.”

OpenCL for Performance

“OpenCL is a fairly new programming model that is designed to help programmers get the most out of a variety of processing elements in heterogeneous environments. Many benchmarks that are available have demonstrated that excellent performance can be obtained over a wide variety of devices. Rather than lock an application into one specific accelerator, by using OpenCL, applications can be run over on a number of different architectures with each showing excellent speedups over a native (host cpu) implementation.”

ArrayFire Updates GPU Software Library

Today ArrayFire announced the release of Version 3.0 of their high-speed software library for GPU computing. The new version features major changes to ArrayFire’s visualization library, a new CPU backend, and dense linear algebra for OpenCL devices. It also includes improvements across the board for ArrayFire’s OpenCL backend.

Call for Papers: International Workshop on OpenCL at Stanford

The International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) has issued its Call for Papers.