2575

Swan: A tool for porting CUDA programs to OpenCL

M. J. Harvey, G. De Fabritiis
High Performance Computing Service, Imperial College London, South Kensington, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
Computer Physics Communications (11 January 2011)

@article{harvey2011swan,

   title={Swan: A tool for porting CUDA programs to OpenCL},

   author={Harvey, MJ and De Fabritiis, G.},

   journal={Computer Physics Communications},

   issn={0010-4655},

   year={2011},

   publisher={Elsevier}

}

Download Download (PDF)   View View   Source Source   Source codes Source codes

Package:

2357

views

The use of modern, high-performance graphical processing units (GPUs) for acceleration of scientific computation has been widely reported. The majority of this work has used the CUDA programming model supported exclusively by GPUs manufactured by NVIDIA. An industry standardisation effort has recently produced the OpenCL specification for GPU programming. This offers the benefits of hardware-independence and reduced dependence on proprietary tool-chains. Here we describe a source-to-source translation tool, “Swan” for facilitating the conversion of an existing CUDA code to use the OpenCL model, as a means to aid programmers experienced with CUDA in evaluating OpenCL and alternative hardware. While the performance of equivalent OpenCL and CUDA code on fixed hardware should be comparable, we find that a real-world CUDA application ported to OpenCL exhibits an overall 50% increase in runtime, a reduction in performance attributable to the immaturity of contemporary compilers. The ported application is shown to have platform independence, running on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs without modification. We conclude that OpenCL is a viable platform for developing portable GPU applications but that the more mature CUDA tools continue to provide best performance.
No votes yet.
Please wait...

* * *

* * *

HGPU group © 2010-2024 hgpu.org

All rights belong to the respective authors

Contact us: