research-article

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Cross-Platform OpenCL Application Development

Authors:

Tyler Sorensen,

Alastair F. DonaldsonAuthors Info & Claims

IWOCL '16: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on OpenCL

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/2909437.2909440

Published: 19 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

One of the benefits to programming of OpenCL is platform portability. That is, an OpenCL program that follows the OpenCL specification should, in principle, execute reliably on any platform that supports OpenCL. To assess the current state of OpenCL portability, we provide an experience report examining two sets of open source benchmarks that we attempted to execute across a variety of GPU platforms, via OpenCL. We report on the portability issues we encountered, where applications would execute successfully on one platform but fail on another. We classify issues into three groups: (1) framework bugs, where the vendor-provided OpenCL framework fails; (2) specification limitations, where the OpenCL specification is unclear and where different GPU platforms exhibit different behaviours; and (3) programming bugs, where non-portability arises due to the program exercising behaviours that are incorrect or undefined according to the OpenCL specification. The issues we encountered slowed the development process associated with our sets of applications, but we view the issues as providing exciting motivation for future testing and verification efforts to improve the state of OpenCL portability; we conclude with a discussion of these.

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Cited By

Levine RCho MMcKee DQuinn ASorensen TJust RFraser G(2023)GPUHarbor: Testing GPU Memory Consistency at Large (Experience Paper)Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3598095(779-791)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597926.3598095
Lecoeur BMohsin HDonaldson A(2023)Program Reconditioning: Avoiding Undefined Behaviour When Finding and Reducing Compiler BugsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912947:PLDI(1801-1825)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591294
Xu YLi ASorensen T(2023)Redwood: Flexible and Portable Heterogeneous Tree Traversal Workloads2023 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS57527.2023.00028(201-213)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPASS57527.2023.00028
Show More Cited By

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Cross-Platform OpenCL Application Development
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis

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cover image ACM Other conferences

IWOCL '16: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on OpenCL

April 2016

131 pages

ISBN:9781450343381

DOI:10.1145/2909437

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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The University of Bristol: The University of Bristol

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 19 April 2016

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IWOCL '16

IWOCL '16: The 4th International Workshop on OpenCL

April 19 - 21, 2016

Vienna, Austria

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Cited By

Levine RCho MMcKee DQuinn ASorensen TJust RFraser G(2023)GPUHarbor: Testing GPU Memory Consistency at Large (Experience Paper)Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3598095(779-791)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597926.3598095
Lecoeur BMohsin HDonaldson A(2023)Program Reconditioning: Avoiding Undefined Behaviour When Finding and Reducing Compiler BugsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912947:PLDI(1801-1825)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591294
Xu YLi ASorensen T(2023)Redwood: Flexible and Portable Heterogeneous Tree Traversal Workloads2023 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS57527.2023.00028(201-213)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPASS57527.2023.00028
Hernandez-Lopez FMuñiz-Pérez O(2022)Parallel fractal image compression using quadtree partition with task and dynamic parallelismJournal of Real-Time Image Processing10.1007/s11554-021-01193-w19:2(391-402)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-021-01193-w
Lupescu GTapus N(2020)Compute framework aspects for integrated GPUs2020 19th RoEduNet Conference: Networking in Education and Research (RoEduNet)10.1109/RoEduNet51892.2020.9324851(1-6)Online publication date: 11-Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/RoEduNet51892.2020.9324851
Lupescu GTapus N(2020)Challenges Porting Blockchain Library to OpenCLIntelligent Methods in Computing, Communications and Control10.1007/978-3-030-53651-0_13(158-166)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53651-0_13
Peng CZhang DMøller A(2019)On the correctness of GPU programsProceedings of the 28th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3293882.3338989(443-447)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
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Peng CRajan A(2019)CLTestCheck: Measuring Test Effectiveness for GPU KernelsFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-16722-6_19(315-331)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2019
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Sorensen TDonaldson ABatty MGopalakrishnan GRakamarić Z(2016)Portable inter-workgroup barrier synchronisation for GPUsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3022671.298403251:10(39-58)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
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Sorensen TDonaldson ABatty MGopalakrishnan GRakamarić ZVisser ESmaragdakis Y(2016)Portable inter-workgroup barrier synchronisation for GPUsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications10.1145/2983990.2984032(39-58)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
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