5 Questions -- Implementing a bunch of OpenCL tools

Hi,
I’m working on an OpenCL IDE for Windows (and possibly in the future Mono/Linux/Mac OS), wrappers around the implementations of OpenCL by ATI and NVIDIA which add more robust error handling, etc, and C# wrapping libraries with completely integrated documentation and error handling. So far, I’ve written a few thousand lines of C++, C++/CLI, and C#, and a couple thousand more lines of C# which parses the cl.h, Khronos man pages, and neatly wraps all the C-line APIs into object oriented apis with enumerations, extra checks, workarounds for platform/device speific bugs, etc, etc. At this point, my C# wrapper generator writes out about 5,000 lines of C++ code (soon to work with Linux as well), and by the time I’m finished with it, it will write out at least another 4,000 lines of C++/CLI and C#. Basically, I have a mini C++/CL.H header to C++/C++/CLI, C#, and C++ + “P/Invoke C#” (for Linux) :^)

In addition to all this work (both x64 and x86 – I have dual boot configurations on virtual hard drives to test the Windows variants, and separate installations of Linux to test those), I’m making my code export an OpenCL.DLL which can target a remote Linux (or Windows) box. One of the advantages of the implementation of running Linux and using OpenCL vs Windows is that the Linux OpenCL does not require a monitor to be attached (which is useful when you have 30-50+ customer cluster nodes being built in house on any given day and want to be able to test compute code or stress test on those GPUs without going into the noisy server testing rooms).

The questions I have are:

  1. What kind of membership does my company require to use the OpenCL name to market these (as of now unnamed) products? Can I get away with just developing these products and doing my own testing without membership? I have discovered many, many bugs in ATI and NVIDIA implementations in the course of writing and testing my code and my wrappers, and have worked around all of them with unit tests in my code generator, including some nasty crashing bugs, so I’m reasonably certain that the Khronos certification doesn’t indicate a reasonable amount of testing to the OpenCL spec and/or documentation, and that my implementation adds value.

  2. In the course of my writing these generated wrappers, error handling, and documentation integration, I have come to notice many inconsistencies with the OpenCL documentations, annoyances with the APIs, and plenty of errors between the way that different implementations deal with ambiguous documentations that I need answers to. For example: if I’m writing an “ICD”, how does GetExtensionFunctionAddress work? By this I mean that I’ll have multiple underlying instances of OpenCL, and someone calls my OpenCL.DLL with clGetExtensionFunctionAddress( “FOO” ); And then I go asking my internal OpenCL.DLL implementations to get extension FOO. But which one do I return? I really don’t expect an ATI extension to work on an NVIDIA device or vice-a-versa. Also, I don’t expect one of my extensions (if I should implement them) would work against an untested OpenCL implementation. Is it clear what error I need to return if I have a cl_mem from one OpenCL.DLL and a cl_mem from another OpenCL.DLL and someone attempts to enqueue a Copy command from one device to another? Perhaps I can issue some synchronization, copy the buffer from one buffer to host memory, and copy from host memory to the other buffer… and what if I want to represent multiple devices as one device and enable a context which spans those virtual devices to do that…

  3. Finally, is there any interest in a commercial OpenCL IDE? What might you be willing to pay for something which made it easy to write OpenCL kernel code and get C++ or simple C# code which turns your kernel into a C#/C++ method + static lib or DLL to wrap CL?

  4. Is there any interest in code which tests your OpenCL implementation for holes, failure to return appropriate error codes or returning error codes at the wrong time/in the wrong method, crashes in the compiler, crashes in allocating memory or using more memory than allocated? Etc?

  5. Finally, is there any interest in running your OpenCL code against remote machines with different CPUs and GPUs to test performance against a large-ish set of current, old, really old, and perhaps new devices as they are disclosed or as they are available in the market, etc?

Feel free to PM me or reply below. I’ll check it sporadically. My email isn’t public…

My test machine has 4 different GPUs and 8 CPU cores (all of them can be run simultaneously with OpenCL – it’s a sight to see, though my next test machine will soon have something like 48 CPU cores and 3200 to maybe up to 6400 GPU cores… all on one motherboard), but we have one box with 8 different x16 GPUs in it (that computer costs something around $10,000 + 8 GPU costs, and it’s a royal pain to configure, and it makes more noise than you want to imagine…).

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of my generator:

And here’s an out-of-date early screenshot of my IDE (the Cypress / Radeon HD 5870 in this case is underclocked to 400MHz - 850MHz is the nominal value):

Thanks!

For membership / trademark questions you should talk to Neil Trevett, the Khronos President. I’ll copy you his email address by PM.

Re the question about GetExtensionFunctionAddress, the intent is that you get back a single function pointer that will work on all underlying device drivers, whether or not they’re from the same vendor. This is no more than the static 1.0 API entry points in the link library also do, functionally, and it is because of the longstanding unpleasant developer experience with Microsoft’s wglGetProcAddress for OpenGL on Windows, which returns GL context-dependent (well, really, driver-dependent in that case) pointers apps have to manage. The implementation may require something moderately arcane, such as generating a code thunk in your wrapper library’s implementation of GetProcAddress which figures out which driver is being called from the parameters and forwards to it (Mesa did exactly this at one point). In an actual ICD loader which integrates with the drivers through a DDI including shared conventions for dispatch tables & data structures, simpler methods may be available.

Is it clear what error I need to return if I have a cl_mem from one OpenCL.DLL and a cl_mem from another OpenCL.DLL and someone attempts to enqueue a Copy command from one device to another?

One of those cl_mem handles was not created by one of the drivers you passed it to. So I would think you get CL_INVALID_MEM_OBJECT just as you would expect when passing any other random value into a command expecting a valid handle (or maybe you get a core dump, depending on driver robustness).

Of course the wrapper could create a single global namespace and translate every name coming from or going to the drivers, which would help with error detection, but not validity since the two drivers correspond to two different incompatible contexts and copying between contexts isn’t supported by EnqueueCopyBuffer. That would just get you to CL_INVALID_CONTEXT instead.

If you want to actually make the two drivers work together at the CL device level, such that you could create a single context encompassing both devices, you are creating an enormous amount of work that is IMO well beyond the scope of what OpenCL 1.0 is intended to model. People have tried to do this sort of thing with heterogeneous OpenGL implementations too, but they’ve never produced something that is anywhere close to being both fully functional and fully performant, AFAIK.

Man, I love your posting style. I’m sure it puts a few off, but what style!

Chris

I also wanted to add my voice to the people liking the original post in this thread. Apologies to the thread starter if he has returned here for more information, since I’m basically giving him an English grade: The grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, format and organisation are supreme. The only crit is that it does ramble on a bit, and sticking with just the first question would have gained points for compact delivery. Otherwise though you seem to have a knack for picking up, understanding, organising and using vocabulary. One would assume these are the credentials required of the most skilled of programmers. As the respondent above said: Full marks for style.