So imagine you want to ask a question about OpenCL that doesn’t seem to be covered by the published specification or you have observed behaviour that vendor specific documentation doesn’t describe, where should you turn for advice or help?

In the case of questions about the the specification, or queries about forthcoming revisions of the standard (or even suggestions), one should definitely go to the Khronos Group’s own OpenCL forum. Here you will find forum members who are actually involved with the OpenCL standard body as well as developers and users of vendor implementations. It’s a fair bet that you will get most specification related questions answered here.

In the case that you believe you are observing something that does not meet the specification as stated, in a vendor implementation, then your first port of call should be the vendor’s own support forum. If it’s an obvious bug or known performance issue the odds are good that it will have already been documented, either in an answer to a prior forum posting or in a FAQ or Release Note.  It should go without saying that you should take care to follow their procedure for submitting queries or bugs before posting to a forum (i.e. do a forum search and read release notes – we don’t compile them just for fun).

Here’s a list of OpenCL related forum resources I have to hand:

• Khronos Group OpenCL forum
• NVIDIA OpenCL forum
• AMD Stream forum (AMD don’t have a public OpenCL forum at time of writing)

• Beyond3D GPGPU Technology & Programming forum
• GPGPU General GPGPU Discussion forum

I’m sure there are more out there, if you find them please send them to me and I’ll start keeping an OpenCL Resource page.