OpenCL 1.1 Specification Released
- New data types including 3-component vectors and additional image formats;
- Handling commands from multiple hosts and processing buffers across multiple devices;
- Operations on regions of a buffer including read, write and copy of 1D, 2D or 3D rectangular regions;
- Enhanced use of events to drive and control command execution;
- Additional OpenCL C built-in functions such as integer clamp, shuffle and asynchronous strided copies;
- Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL and OpenGL events.
Full Press Release is available here.
If you are an NVIDIA registered developer you can download their OpenCL 1.1 Conformance Candidate and AMD will have OpenCL 1.1 support included with their next Steam SDK release.
GPU Technology Conference 2010
Having attended the 2009 GPU Technology conference it will be very interesting to see how much things have moved on in the intervening twelve months. For heterogeneous computing to really show it’s commercial potential, practical results need to be delivered on the back of the marketing impetus delivered by the unveiling of Fermi last year. With Fermi based parts actually being available in the flesh this time round I expect there to be quite a lot of interesting announcements going on.
For the full press release see here and the landing page is here.
CUDA 3.0 toolkit released
NVIDIA has released version 3.0 of their CUDA Toolkit. As well as some significant new features this release also provides tools to prepare for the upcoming Fermi-based GPUs. Highlights of this release include:
- Support for the Fermi architecture, with:
- Native 64-bit GPU support
- Multiple Copy Engine support
- ECC reporting
- Concurrent Kernel Execution
- Fermi HW debugging support in cuda-gdb
- Fermi HW profiling support for CUDA C and OpenCL in Visual Profiler
- C++ Class Inheritance and Template Inheritance support for increased programmer productivity
- A new unified interoperability API for Direct3D and OpenGL, with support for:
- OpenGL texture interop
- Direct3D 11 interop support
- CUDA Driver / Runtime Buffer Interoperability, which allows applications using the CUDA Driver API to also use libraries implemented using the CUDA C Runtime such as CUFFT and CUBLAS.
- CUBLAS now supports all BLAS1, 2, and 3 routines including those for single and double precision complex numbers
- Up to 100x performance improvement while debugging applications with cuda-gdb
- cuda-gdb hardware debugging support for applications that use the CUDA Driver API
- cuda-gdb support for JIT-compiled kernels
- New CUDA Memory Checker reports misalignment and out of bounds errors, available as a stand-alone utility and debugging mode within cuda-gdb
- CUDA Toolkit libraries are now versioned, enabling applications to require a specific version, support multiple versions explicitly, etc.
- CUDA C/C++ kernels are now compiled to standard ELF format
- Support for device emulation mode has been packaged in a separate version of the CUDA C Runtime (CUDART), and is deprecated in this release. Now that more sophisticated hardware debugging tools are available and more are on the way, NVIDIA will be focusing on supporting these tools instead of the legacy device emulation functionality.
- On Windows, use the new Parallel Nsight development environment for Visual Studio, with integrated GPU debugging and profiling tools (was code-named “Nexus”). Please see www.nvidia.com/nsight for details.
- On Linux, use cuda-gdb and cuda-memcheck, and check out the solutions from Allinea and TotalView that will be available soon.
- Support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195 production driver package:
- Double Precision
- Graphics Interoperability with OpenCL, Direc3D9, Direct3D10, and Direct3D11 for high performance visualization
- Query for Compute Capability, so you can target optimizations for GPU architectures (cl_nv_device_attribute_query)
- Ability to control compiler optimization settings via support for pragma unroll in OpenCL kernels and an extension that allows programmers to set compiler flags. (cl_nv_compiler_options)
- OpenCL Images support, for better/faster image filtering
- 32-bit global and local atomics for fast, convenient data manipulation
- Byte Addressable Stores, for faster video/image processing and compression algorithms
- Support for the latest OpenCL spec revision 1.0.48 and latest official Khronos OpenCL headers as of 2010-02-17
The toolkit, drivers, tools and documentation are available from http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_0_downloads.html.
gDEBugger CL Beta
Graphic Remedy has announced the imminent release of gDEBugger for OpenCL™. This will bring the advanced Debugging, Profiling and Memory Analysis abilities to OpenCL developers that OpenGL users have been enjoying for several years!
gDEBugger CL is now in beta with the official version will be released in Q2 2010. Sign up on the gDEBugger for OpenCL page.
ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.01
What’s New in v2.01
- Update release for ATI Stream SDK v2.0.
- Support for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3.
- Support for Ubuntu® 9.10.
- Support for debugging OpenCL™ with GDB on x86 CPUs under Linux® (see application note for more details).
- Preview: Support for OpenCL™ / Microsoft® DirectX® 9 interoperability. Please see this knowledge base article for more information about this preview feature.
- Additional OpenCL™ samples:
- BoxFilter
- FFT
- GaussianNoise (under cpp_cl)
- URNG
- Stream KernelAnalyzer with OpenCL™ support (available for download separately from Stream KernelAnalyzer Product Page).
- Various OpenCL™ compiler and runtime fixes and enhancements (see developer release notes for more details).
- Support for ATI Radeon™ HD 5670 GPU and ATI Radeon™ HD 5570 GPU.
AMD/ATI Release Stream 2.0 SDK with OpenCL 1.0 Support
Just before Christmas ATI delivered a nice present for everyone interested in OpenCL development, in the form a full release of their Stream 2.0 SDK, including a whole host of additional goodies. For me the most important additional features are:
- support for the an Installable Client Driver (ICD), which allows for multiple OpenCL implementations to co-exist on the same system
- a stream performance profiler integrated into Visual Studio 2008
- a preview implementation of support for Double Precision in OpenCL C kernels
- a raft of OpenGL, DirectX 10 and CAL interoperability support previews
Find the full details here.
SiSoftware Sandra 2010 tips up with OpenCL support
SiSoftware have release Sandra 2010 benchmark suite with OpenCL support (adding to the CUDA and Stream/CTM support found in Sandra 2009). SiSoftware have also added DirectX11 Compute Shader support to be the first benchmark utility that allows you to compare basic computational and bandwidth performance across a wide range of programming interfaces and also now across multiple vendor platforms.
The development was undertaken in collaboration with AMD who have the first CPU + GPU OpenCL implementation and provides an interesting chance to compare and contrast performance of CPUs and GPUs on the same workloads.
AMD Stream SDK beta with GPU OpenCL support
Is available now from AMD’s Developer Central Dowload pages.
OpenCL Tutorial at Hot Chips 21
The Khronos Group are presenting an OpenCL Tutorial Session at Hot Chips 21 this Sunday. presenters include Neil Trevett (Khronos President) and Affie Munshi (OpenCL Specification Editor), along with speakers from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Nokia and EA.