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  • LibreOffice Receives More OpenCL / GPU Support

    Phoronix: LibreOffice Receives More OpenCL / GPU Support

    Last month LibreOffice Calc received a lot of OpenCL/GPU support for various spreadsheet functions. Since then, besides picking up better multi-threaded support, the open-source office suite has implemented more support for OpenCL GPGPU computing...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    i jost wonder...

    if this is really a thing that people can utilize. Eg. if there are really spreadsheets that are big/complex enough that a difference is noticeable?
    ... on the other hand I know that some businesses are crazy and implement whole business processes in spreadsheets ...

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    • #3
      Originally posted by YoungManKlaus View Post
      if this is really a thing that people can utilize. Eg. if there are really spreadsheets that are big/complex enough that a difference is noticeable?
      ... on the other hand I know that some businesses are crazy and implement whole business processes in spreadsheets ...
      I think it is just trivial to implement in OpenCL, low hanging fruits to gain some PR one might say. I would rather see more work/support put into Gimp(Gegl) and Blender(Cycles) OpenCL instead, but that stuff is harder I guess.

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      • #4
        Is AMD who's leading LibreOffice development with OpenCL

        Anyone who's read great amounts of technology news will easily find that amd is leading the most inovative and experimental hardware technology whatever the area in common market (business or home entertaining). The time has come to "Kavari" (the first real APU).

        In January 2014, AMD will release the world's first's APU (what have dynamic memory manager, the CPU and GPU sharing the same memory) what's is much faster than common CPUs for graphical working, acord to AMD comparisons until now. Obviously, they trying to consolidate the APU in the market, and i'm felling they are leading the right way.

        All these graphical expensive video card's with high energy consuption these days, make the true APU not just an alternative, but the best choice for cost / benefit. I really believe the future is with APU, other companies will enter in this game too, but AMD is far away in front of them.

        AMD is pushing the OpenCL development in Calc (in reality they may have been working in other projects too) because of their APU.

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        • #5
          if this is really a thing that people can utilize. Eg. if there are really spreadsheets that are big/complex enough that a difference is noticeable?
          ... on the other hand I know that some businesses are crazy and implement whole business processes in spreadsheets ...
          There is actually 2 scenarios where openCL support will be useful.
          1. Huge spreadsheets.
          2. Spreadsheets being run on netbooks, low power laptops, single core computers, old dual cores, etc.

          On lower power computers that have a graphics chip that supports openCL, it will help process the data in parallel, speeding up the loading time.
          Also, the effort to implement OpenCL support should also help with adding multithreading support because they have similar concerns on data being thread safe and being processed in the right order.


          If you have an AMD A series, then things become interesting as it won't have the performance penalty of copying data to and from the graphics card. Which means the calc features will run allot faster.

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          • #6
            ua=42: good answer, thx
            I didn't ask out of malice but because I was really interested.

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            • #7
              AFAIK they already helped GIMP devs to bring some plugins to OpenCL and aren't going to stop.
              Cycles is not as easy thing at all. But keep in mind. Cycles was created by someone who knows CUDA and worked with CUDA and wrote Cycles in CUDA. Then Brecht added OpenCL support for the functions that were already similiar to the ones available in CUDA. AFAIK by Brecht himself, he just transcends CUDA functions to OpenCL during compile time.
              CUDA is written with NVidia architecture in mind that changed through years after they bought technology. AFAIK there is almost no good OpenCL books on Nvidia cards, alot of developers complained about it.
              So yes, its a pity for myself as well but you can't make a clear example of bad OpenCL in AMD based on Cycles.
              From user point of view: LuxRender works on AMD GPU, Cycles isn't. Yes, both are having troubles with yet not as mature as CUDA standart but one team is always solving it while the other doesn't give a sh*t and still writes vendor specific code. So complaining about Cycles that is optimised for Nvidia hardware is strange.

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              • #8
                It'd be even more impressive if they actually offloaded the core work to dedicated processing servers instead of a single local machine.

                If you aren't 'interwebised', then yeah, obviously fall back to local-CL over the servers CL.

                That shit was sorted out in the 70's. Some thing called Unix.
                Hi

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by stiiixy View Post
                  It'd be even more impressive if they actually offloaded the core work to dedicated processing servers instead of a single local machine.

                  If you aren't 'interwebised', then yeah, obviously fall back to local-CL over the servers CL.

                  That shit was sorted out in the 70's. Some thing called Unix.
                  Say, I've got Dual AMD R 290X beasts spinning its wheels with over 5600 stream processors and and AMD FX-8350 with 32GB ready to crunch and you're complaining about off-loading distributed OpenCL first onto a distributed network of servers?

                  How about we scale properly on a workstation with OpenCL kernels flooding the GPGPUs first locally, then write a grid app to extend to a supercomputer [you know something the consumer and office will never buy].

                  Same goes for Blender, GIMP and more. Outside of a game studio/motion picture studio, no one is buying a render farm.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
                    Say, I've got Dual AMD R 290X beasts spinning its wheels with over 5600 stream processors and and AMD FX-8350 with 32GB ready to crunch and you're complaining about off-loading distributed OpenCL first onto a distributed network of servers?

                    How about we scale properly on a workstation with OpenCL kernels flooding the GPGPUs first locally, then write a grid app to extend to a supercomputer [you know something the consumer and office will never buy].

                    Same goes for Blender, GIMP and more. Outside of a game studio/motion picture studio, no one is buying a render farm.
                    sure, sure, easy, you are both just forgetting something:
                    - someone has to pay for that super computer
                    - someone has to write/maintain that code
                    - it takes time to offload work packages to remote machines
                    - some people prefer to keep their data to themselves
                    - you can already always use remote-desktop to some powerful machine, and now even with html5

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