ARGOMENTO:

Workshop 2011

A fine agosto ad Hannover. Un bel programma, ma ovviamente nessun ricercatore italiano...

Il programma comincia ad essere definito (manca una settimana)

The workshop is for researchers, scientists and developers with significant experience or interest in BOINC. Areas of interest include:

GPU and multi-thread applications; CUDA and OpenCL
Virtual machines as application container
Multi-user projects
Remote job submission
Integration with hubs, clouds, grids, and desktop grids
OpenID

Interessante che al primo punto mettano le GPU

Molto interessante anche che il secondo giorno, finite le sessioni teoriche, ci sia un hackfest in cui i partecipanti sono invitati, in gruppi, a scrivere codice:

Possible activities include:
design something
write code
get existing software to work
write or improve documentation.

Oggi, che è l'hackfest ci sono sessioni pratiche interessanti:

OpenCL apps

Goal: Create a "cookbook" for deploying OpenCL apps.

Results:

Working code samples for NVIDIA and AMD can be found in the BOINC source tree under /src
The samples should probably be unified/consolidated (kernels might differ for NVIDIA and AMD of course)
We tested both samples on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs respectively - success
There's a wiki page describing how to build the samples on Windows, Linux and Mac OS
Missing in the current client
Enumerate all OpenCL platforms/devices, keep them in a list (array)
Pass the list IDs of the platform/device to be used by the science app (as an integer)
Provide two API calls: taking the list ID, returning the cl_platform_id and the cl_device_id (opaque complex types, required by science app to create OpenCL context)
Make sure OpenCL and CUDA as well as OpenCL and CAL apps don't collide (use the same resource/GPU)
Make sure multi-vendor GPU setups (single host system) are supported (does apply to Mac OS, probably to also to Windows 7. Linux doesn't support drivers from different vendors, correct?)
There are a number of lessons learned available at Einstein@Home with respect to AMD and NVIDIA driver issues related to OpenCL. We could add those to the BOINC wiki.