Invitation to a Standard Programming Interface for Massively Parallel Computing Environment: OpenCL

Abstract

Multicore/manycore architecture accelerates demand for a new programming environment to utilize the massive processors integrated in an LSI. GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is one of the typical hardware environments. The programming environments on GPU are traditionally vendor-/hardware-specific, where complicate the management of uniform programs that access computing resources of the massively parallel platform. The recently released OpenCL is expected to become a standard for providing a uniform programming environment for the heterogeneous processors from different vendors. This tutorial paper introduces the overview of the OpenCL that motivates the programmers who are going to program the massively parallel hardware or who migrates the programming method from another vendor specific programming interface to the OpenCL. This paper explains the characteristics of the OpenCL interface with describing in detail the basic structures used in the program. Moreover, this paper discusses performance aspects to evaluate advanced programming techniques that improve the performance of the OpenCL applications.