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AMD is pushing into the GPU-compute space hard with systems like Fusion, and has now managed to get their FirePro discrete card certified for OpenCL acceleration of the Abaqus Finite Element solver.

“Many of the tasks that used to take a full day to complete can now be done in about half that time with GPU compute, saving engineering time and resources during product research and design, and reducing overall time to market,” said Sandeep Gupte, general manager, AMD Professional Graphics. “With SIMULIA’s latest realistic simulation software, which is compliant with OpenCL standards, engineers can achieve precise results in their design analysis with minimal hardware limitations.”

via AMD FirePro certified for OpenCL-compliant Abacus finite element analysis (FEA) software | FireUser Blog.

Science amd, gpgpu, opencl, simulation

In the ongoing battle between OpenCL & CUDA, AMD has launched the next volley with their latest AMD Accelerated Parallel PRocessing SDK v2.5.

In related news, AMD earlier this month announced [press release] the availability of its AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.5.  This OpenCL-driven SDK offers programmers tools to add general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing support to their applications.  AMD seems to be taking a wise tact here, as its CPU performance trails that of rival Intel Corp. (INTC), but its GPU performance is well ahead of its rival.  With GPU-enabled apps, Fusion APUs may finally start performing their Intel comparables in everyday applications like Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Office suite or Adobe Systems, Inc.’s (ADBE), assuming the app-makers add support.

This comes along with the announcement of their new C-series and E-series processors, boosting the speeds of their existing Fusion APU’s to new heights.  The new E-series is, however, a bit slower and seems to be targeted more at the ultra low-power mobile market.  Both series however now support DisplayPort++ and HDMI 1.4a.

via DailyTech – AMD Unleashes New GPGPU Computing Tools, 3 New Fusion Chips.

Hardware amd, fusion, opencl, sdk

Surely you’ve heard of WebGL by now, the Khronos-developed bindings to OpenGL for Javascript.  What you may not have heard of is a new API from Khronos called WebCL, the same thing but for OpenCL.  Mac Users can check out a simple prototype of the WebCL bindings for WebKit (safari) via a library at Google Code.

WebCL is a new activity in Khronos that is defining JavaScript bindings to OpenCL. The “WebCL for WebKit” project is an early implementation of WebCL for the open source WebKit browser engine. The design and implementation of WebCL for WebKit are similar to that of WebGL. A typical WebCL application will start by making a “WebCLComputeContext” which is then used to invoke OpenCL APIs. An example (not complete, but to show the flavor of WebCL) is:

webcl – WebCL for WebKit – Google Project Hosting.

Science khronos, opencl, webcl

AMD isn’t taking the success of their Fusion APU’s for granted, and is more openly embracing the GPGPU and OpenCL ecosystem with a collection of tools aimed at making OpenCL just as easy as CUDA.

One of the new tools, gDEBugger, is an “advanced OpenCL and OpenGL debugger, profiler, and memory analyzer.” AMD acquired the software when it purchased graphics startup Graphic Remedy in October 2010. Other programs, which aren’t expected until Q3 2011, include Parallel Path Analyzer (useful for optimizing a program to run across both CPU and GPU), Global Memory for Acceleration (simplifies memory management) and the Task Manager API. This last is described as “a framework for managing compute tasks in a heterogeneous multi-core environment. OpenCL kernels can be automatically scheduled to execute on an available and task-appropriate device, providing dynamic load balancing, optimizing use of available compute resources and removing the burden of explicit schedule handling.”

via AMD Announces New GPGPU Programming Tools – HotHardware.

Science amd, opencl

AMD has a new press release out touting more OpenCL offerings, but includes a nice list of OpenCL applications.  It’s not as extensive as NVidia’s CUDA lists, but has some big names like ArcSoft, Corel, Sony Vegas Pro, and Rovi.

“Today’s creative professional needs a complete solution that delivers clear, crisp and stutter-free visuals that will allow them to edit, process and create content quickly and without interruption,” said Dave Chaimson, vice president of global marketing, Sony Creative Software. “New support has been added to Vegas Pro 10.0d for accelerated OpenCL based video rendering. We see this as a solid first step towards a faster production workflow for video professionals, and we are strongly committed to the OpenCL standard.”

Also of interest is a rather impressive list of Engineering software using OpenCL for simulation acceration.  Dassault, Altair, and ESI are all in the list, along with a few others.

If you want to know more, they’ve got a conference (The AMD Fusion Developer Summit) coming up next week in Bellevue, Washington where they’ll be demonstrating them.

via AMD and Leading Software Vendors Continue to Expand Offerings Optimized for OpenCL™ Standard.

Science amd, gpgpu, opencl

So, for the last week or so the internet has been abuzz with stories about “BitCoin”, the new all-digital currency that’s going to destabilize governments around the world and bring us to a new utopian society.  Well, yeah it’s a lot of hype.  But when I heard about the “mining” aspect of it, and how it’s almost entirely GPU based, I figured I would check it out.

From what I can tell, the “mining” part is really just a brute-force hash attack, looking for specific numbers.  I ran some experiments with this once before as part of my Quadro5000 review using HashGPU.  Using the OpenCL bitcoin miner, I figured I could some up with some nice results.  I had a machine handy with two GeForce GTX285′s in it, and easily managed to eek out about 64Mh/s on each card, for a total around 128Mh/s. (Mh/s = Million Hashes per Second).  I also happen to have the Quadro 5000 card around, based on the Fermi Architecture, so I thought I’ld throw it in as it’s not currently in the Wiki Hardware Results.

I was very disappointed to find that my Quadro5000 could only manage about  58-59Mh/s, a startling 10% less than the GTX285.  This truly baffled me.  The Quadro 5000, which handily beats AMD cards in most benchmarks, falls waaay behind the ATI offerings which easily rake in 100+Mh/s, some hitting 300Mh/s.

All in all, I ran with two GTX285′s for about 4 days, and mined all of 2 BitCoins.  Presumably with a single AMD Radeon 6990, for $700 which claims to rake in over 650Mh/s , I could have make 5x that.  It’s interesting to see that as popular as CUDA is, there are still several problems where AMD’s “stream” design beats NVidia’s hands-down.

And of course, this wouldn’t be a BitCoin article if I didn’t include “If you liked this article, feel free to send some BitCoins to 1HXHDYeQux5BVzwTF5gEwMS2MgaKXwXeft“.

P.S. If anyone actually does send me any, shoot me an email with the amount for a Shout-Out here.

Update 7pm: Wow.. I just refreshed my wallet and thanks to the 3 people who actually sent me a total of 0.12 BTC, the equivalent of about $1 at current exchange rates.

Hardware, Science amd, bitcoin, cuda, gpgpu, nvidia, opencl

The Georgia Tech NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence is preparing a nice 2-day long tutorial on GPU programming and heterogeneous computing, including both CUDA and OpenCL.  The event will only cost you a $100 registration fee and the cost of your room and time, making it one of the best ways to get into GPU programming.

Hit the website for all the details and links.

Keeneland Workshop | Keeneland.

Science cuda, education, nvidia, opencl

Realizing the success of Nvidia’s CUDA university initiatives, AMD recently announced a new OpenCL University Kit, a collection of materials that can be used in any university environment to teach OpenCL programming.

“Teaching students to effectively leverage the OpenCL standard involves all the intricacies of parallel programming plus support for a new class of heterogeneous computing devices built on a variety of hardware technologies,” said David Kaeli, professor and associate dean of undergraduate programs, Northeastern University College of Engineering. “The OpenCL University Kit introduced by AMD is an easy tool to enable educators to quickly introduce OpenCL learning into their curriculum, helping them strike a balance between teaching syntax and higher level architectural issues.”

The kit includes 13 lectures, with instructor and speaker notes, as well as code examples.  Combined with the recently announced ‘Accelerated Parallel Processing SDK‘, (the new name for the old Stream SDK) it’s a great way to get into OpenCL development.

via AMD Helps Advance Parallel Computing with OpenCL™ University Kit.

Science amd, app, education, opencl, sdk, stream

Not wanting to let NVidia get all the hype for their announcements at GDC this week, AMD also announced new features in the OpenCL space.  One of interest to many is a new OpenCL-driven Bullet Physics plugin for Maya 2011.

“AMD is committed to collaborating with partners like Autodesk on industry standards and open-source software solutions that open up a world of vivid visual experiences,” said Janet Matsuda, general manager of AMD Professional Graphics. “This new plug-in will give CG content developers an open development path with OpenCL and a powerful solution for incorporating high-quality physics that offer realistic animation of how rendered objects move in a game or film.”

Unfortunately, it’s not standard with Maya2012 like the NVidia PhysX solution but it’s at least another option.

via AMD Showcases New Open Source Physics Plug-in for Autodesk Maya 2011 at Game Developers Conference.

Graphics amd, bullet, gdc, maya, opencl

AMD has published a “whitepaper” (it irks me that they call these Whitepapers when they’re actually powerpoint presentations) discussing optimizations for Image Convolution algorithms on both CPU and GPU.  They start with an algorithm and add some optimizations for the memory overlap, and then naively port it to a Radeon 5870 to run in 1511 ms.  Then, with some careful optimizations, work it down to a mere 182ms!

Download the PDF, or view it Online.

Science algorithm, amd, opencl, whitepaper