Another Open-Source OpenCL Project Pops Up

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Another Open-Source OpenCL Project Pops Up

This week has been busy with OpenCL news with the release of Portable OpenCL and libclc, but now there's been another project brought up and that's a German university research project to create a high-performance OpenCL driver for the CPU...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAwMzQ

[89c51]

i would be glad if they had put all the time and efford in making Clover (btw denis seems to have resumed his work on it) work on HW

[entropy]

Denis seems to be a quite gifted person.
If I'm right, he's just 18/19 years old.
Some of the comments in his blog, from well-known developers, clearly
stated that they are really impressed by what he accomplished during his GSoC project.

[timofonic]

Denis seems to be a quite gifted person.
If I'm right, he's just 18/19 years old.
Some of the comments in his blog, from well-known developers, clearly
stated that they are really impressed by what he accomplished during his GSoC project.

There's a big bunch of smart young boys in the FOSS community, it's a great opportunity for them to show their real skills in a meritocratic way and not get discriminated against age any other reason. It's the benefit of the hacker ethic

[wizard69]

What is the point?

I understand the possibility of code commonality but beyond that why OpenCL on the CPU? If you are going to run on the CPU why not simply use your normal C/C++ code & development tools?

[bridgman]

OpenCL gives you a relatively easy way to spread work across a lot of CPU cores, in addition to the code commonality you mentioned earlier.

[TeoLinuX]

Any benefit for end users?

Even if OpenCL would be fully implemented in a way or another, how many applications are ready to use it?
I mean, for the general desktop.
AFAIK Mac OSX has been sporting it for 1 year already, in a official way and in a well integrated environment. Is there any major application taking advantage of it?
I'm just asking out of curiosity, not criticizing. I admit I know little or nothing about it.

[wizard69]

OpenCL is used extensively.

You have good questions, it is good to be curios.

Even if OpenCL would be fully implemented in a way or another, how many applications are ready to use it?

A loaded question! People need to understand that some (many?) apps will never benefit from OpenCL. GPUs are only capable of acceleratining certain types of calculations. However there is a catch here.

That catch is that Apple uses OpenCL deep inside of Core Image (I believe, could have been quartz) so in a sense all apps benefit from GPU acceleration. Maybe I should say the system benefits as the GPU effectively reduces CPU load.

I mean, for the general desktop.
AFAIK Mac OSX has been sporting it for 1 year already, in a official way and in a well integrated environment. Is there any major application taking advantage of it?

Certainly there are apps taking advantage of the capability. However you need to understand what types of apps those are. They are not run of the mill desktop apps.

I'm just asking out of curiosity, not criticizing. I admit I know little or nothing about it.

That is not a problem. There is extensive mis understandings out there with respect to OpenCL and GPU computing in general. The nature of the GPU beast (right now) is that it is only viable for acceleration of highly parallel calculations. The ability go the GPU to accelerate common desktop apps is extremely limited.

So you need apps that have or can be arraigned to have data sets that can be processed in parallel before GPU computing becomes of value. Given that OpenCL is perhaps one of Apples biggest success stories with respect to software initiatives. The adoption is wide spread on any number of platforms.