Intel released OpenCL 1.1 for Linux

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-sdk/

by toni • 15 years ago

34 11 15 years ago

software.intel.com

gabi38• 15 years ago

So who the hell actually use OpenCL?

eliben• 15 years ago

AFAIU, OpenCL is still a new technology - poised as competition to Nvidia's rather popular CUDA. However, in contrast with CUDA which is Nvidia-specific, OpenCL is an open standard backed by many vendors (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple, IBM, Qualcomm and others).

Don't for get that GPGPU is becoming hotter and hotter now that the computing devices blend and become heterogeneous (i.e. CPUs come with embedded GPUs, GPUs doing general-purpose computations, special acceleration hardware, etc). OpenCL is supposed to help with programming these devices.

pygy_• 15 years ago

Bitcoin miners, for example.

See poclbm.py[1] and others.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Poclbm

tomjen32• 15 years ago

I do - and someday you may do so as well.

One of the things they are trying to GPU accelerate is improved MRI scannings - imagine taking images for every 1mm and then stitch it together so that you get a 3d model of the area which the doctors can look at from every angle.

Unfortunately that takes way, way too much computer power to be feasible today.

nodata• 15 years ago

Why do the images need to be stitched together?

andrewcooke• 15 years ago

i do! i write custom code for a small "consultancy" in geophysics (we're a handful of people from academia that somehow ended up developing software for people - and it doesn't really have to be geophysics, that's just where we started...).

my most successful project was an inverse problem for mining - taking a bunch of seismic traces and, from that, calculating a 3d map of the source structure (microseismicity - this technique is called SET (seismic emission tomography)). there's an abstract here - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMIN41A1352D (if anyone wants i can send them the poster, if i can find it!).

incidentally, the AMD OpenCL implementation worked fine on Intel processors already (and has done for a year or so now). i made some notes at http://www.acooke.org/cute/Developing0.html

it's very similar to cuda, but has a couple of advantages. first, it's really well supported on macs. second you aren't stuck with nvidia's hardware (their support is terrible - had a client stuck waiting on results for weeks because they wouldn't respond to issues that eventually turned out to be a failed board). the main disadvantage is that the associated tools/libs aren't as mature.

and a final piece of advice - if you have a finite budget, and don't need 64bit support, you get way better performance per $ using average gaming cards rather than their top-end GPU hardware (although i suspect we'll try out amazon's gpu cloud stuff soon and avoid our own hardware for projects that don't have huge data sets).

rbanffy• 15 years ago

Some folks were considering using CUDA from the Linux kernel. I imagined it being used for accelerating block hash calculation in block-deduplicating filesystems (that would be a nice addition to BtrFS, BTW).

And, if you can use CUDA to accelerate stuff like that, you can use OpenCL.

z3032• 15 years ago

No reason why not, for most things they are going to be interchangeable, think DirectX vs. OpenGL

codedivine• 15 years ago

Notes:

1. This only runs on CPUs. Does not take advantage of any GPUs. However, it is great to have CPU implementations for both development purposes as well as for portability of code over multiple types of platforms.

2. AMD also has had an OpenCL 1.1 CPU implementation for a while now and you can use it for running stuff on either CPU or AMD GPUs. I have been using AMD SDK and it has been great as well.

Intel released OpenCL 1.1 for Linux

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