This is a 4 series of 4 talks about GPGPUS, intended for the practical engineer:
1. Motivation, AMD's architecture
2. OpenCL
3.Case studies, Dos and Don'ts
4.Tools and Profiling for Performance
General Purpose GPU programming became a hot topic in the last few years, ranging from academic studies to being used by commercial software products. As an example, three out of the world's top10 supercomputers (June2011 list) contain GPUs in them. This series of lectures focuses on OpenCL, the open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
The third and fourth meetings will include hands-on experience, under Ofer's guidance. For these meetings, each participant will have to bring a laptop with:
1. Linux (this is Haifux, the Haifa Linux Club)
2. An x86 processor, either AMD or Intel. An IPAD is not good for this purpose.
3. AMD's OpenCL implementation installed. It works both on AMD and Intel, installation details for those who need them will follow.
4. Eclipse installed.
5. If possible, an AMD GPU, with a version number of 54 or higher. Use "lspci | grep VGA" to find the GPU vendor & model.
To arrange for machine access for those who do not have a suitable laptop, as well as prepare for the series, please email in private to
webmaster@haifux.org
• If you intend to attend the series
• If you have (or do not have) the required gear. In particular, if you have an AMD GPU.
Syllabus: Introduction to GPGPU Programming
General Purpose GPU programming became a hot topic in the last few years,
ranging from academic studies to being used by commercial software products. As
an example, three out of the world's top10 supercomputers (June2011 list)
contain GPUs in them. This series of lectures focuses on OpenCL, the open
standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
1. GPGPU introduction
The first lecture is an introduction to GPU architecture and GPGPU programing.
It covers the differences between GPU and CPU architectures, and how these
differences impose restrictions on programming GPUs. We will also touch the
issue of memory aspects of GPU architecture and the overall system (CPU & GPU)
2. OpenCL overview
From the Khronos website: "OpenCL" is the first open, royalty-free standard for
cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal
computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. This lecture will provide an
overview of OpenCL, covering the API programming aspects (such as OpenCL
objects, contexts, queues, events, etc.) as well as the language enhancements
(such as vectors, images, samplers, built-in functions etc.)
3. OpenCL Do's and Don'ts
This lecture provides a practical guide for programming in OpenCL by doing a
hands-on guided experience of writing OpenCL applications and kernels. Starting
from basic examples through more complex scenarios, we will provide some tips
for writing code that provides the required correct results. We will also
provide some performance tips.
4. OpenCL Optimization & Profiling
This lecture focuses on performance aspects of OpenCL. We will provide a
hands-on experience of improving performance of OpenCL kernels by optimizing a
specific example. In addition we will show ways to profile the kernel,
including working with profiling tools such as AMD kernel profiler and
gDebugger. Note that some of issues presented in this lecture will be possible
only on AMD GPUs.
Lecture slides in PDF format
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