Daily techtalk: OpenCL journey

The whole story began a few years ago, when I started some experience to build a machine which perform best on BOINC projects. If we think about todays revolution, it was ages ahead. With BOINC the crow given their resources to different projects, and with these efforts projects gets more computing power than, available with a purchase of a supercomputer.

The projects initially used CPU computations. Everyone knows SETI project. Later on the developers of the projects realized that with the use of the GPU, we can gain multiple times acceleration. Currently the projects mainly use CUDA and OpenCL. But if we look practically, I think OpenCL will be the one which worth the efforts to look for.

The genius feature of this technology is that, we can create general codes in OpenCL, which can run on different hardware. With this feature we able to use the same code on CPU, ATI/NVIDIA GPU, and also on Intel Multi Core accelerator cards, and with the latest developments on DSPs/FPGAs.

With the ability to run the code on different technologies, we are able to choose the best platform without rewriting the code to a different platform.

From the performance perspective. On my old machine I was able to write a code which processes 1GB of data within 0.4 second. Anyone who has the same job, knows what does this mean. This result was reached without code optimization or scale to the four available GPUs (NVIDIA GTX580 which 4 generations older than the current).

Why I suggest everyone to make a test with this possibility is the following reason:

The main performance gain not only came from the technology change. Much more about the new way of thinking what needed for the OpenCL.

With this we can get hundred times runtime reduction, just from the code review. For a more efficient much green IT this is a must.

I think the current supercomputers started to go this direction also. Now FPGA is a real alternative to GPUs.

Just check the following links:
http://www.nallatech.com/solutions/fpga-accelerated-computing/opencl-fpga-cards/

Nallatech is a real pioneer in this area! I recommend them!