An introduction to OpenCL

Thursday 16 Jun 2011, 09:00 → 17:00 Europe/Zurich

Training center, room 11 (CERN)

Alfio Lazzaro (CERN openlab)

OpenCL is a standard for programming heterogeneous computers built from CPUs, GPUs and other processors. It includes a framework to define the platform in terms of a host (e.g. a CPU) and one or more compute devices (e.g. a GPU) plus a C-based programming language for writing programs for the compute devices. Using OpenCL, a programmer can write task-based and data-parallel programs that use all the resources of the heterogeneous computer. In this tutorial, we will introduce OpenCL.
This will be a “programmer’s introduction” where we cover the ideas behind OpenCL but also show how these ideas are translated into source code. We will do this through a series of progressively more challenging examples, thereby providing a set of pedagogically useful examples that experienced HPC programmers can use to quickly become productive OpenCL programmers.
In the afternoon there will be an hands-on tutorial. Please, bring your own laptop. We will provide access to some machines with Intel OpenCL Linux installed, but it would be best if you had OpenCL installed on your own laptop. We will drive the tutorial around the Windows release from Intel, but we invite to use Linux version. You can download the beta release of OpenCL (Linux and Windows) from Intel at:
        http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-sdk/
For Apple laptops, OpenCL is included with Xcode for Mac OS X (Snow Leopard release and beyond). You can also use the AMD release of OpenCL for x86 processors which can be downloaded at:
        http://developer.amd.com/SDKS/AMDAPPSDK/Pages/default.aspx
Tim Mattson's bio.

Lectures

Convener: Dr Timothy Mattson (Intel Labs)

slides OpenCL-intro-ISC11.pdf

12:30 Lunch

Hands on Training

Convener: Dr Timothy Mattson (Intel Labs)

Exercises Exercises

slides OpenCL_api_Summary.pdf OpenCL-exercises.pdf