alphaWorks : OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power : Overview

COLLECTED BY

Organization: Internet Archive

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls. At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer. View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Collection: Wide Crawl started March 2011

Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.

What�s in the data set:

Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
Number of hosts: 29,032,069

The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa�s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.

However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.

We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available �warts and all� for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.

If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you�re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say �yes� to all requests, since we�re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.

TIMESTAMPS

OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power

OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems

Date Posted: October 30, 2009

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Update: March 31, 2011
Conformant implementation of OpenCL 1.1 Specification

What is OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power?

OpenCL™ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

OpenCL supports a wide range of applications, from embedded and consumer software to HPC solutions, through a low-level, high performance, portable abstraction. By creating an efficient, close-to-the-metal programming interface, OpenCL will form the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools, middleware and applications.

The OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power is an IBM implementation of the OpenCL 1.1 Specification. This implementation is for Power hardware running the Linux operating system and has been tested on the IBM BladeCenter QS22 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 or 5.6, IBM Bladecenter JS22, JS23, JS43 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, 5.6, or 6.0 and the IBM Power 750, 755 server, IBM BladeCenter PS700, PS701, PS702 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1.

Leveraging the optimization and rich functionality of IBMs family of XL compilers, the development kit deploys a new member, the IBM XL C for OpenCL compiler. This compiler delivers high performance application development capability with exploitation of the Cell/B.E., Power6, and Power7 hardware architectures.

The OpenCL Specification is an open standard managed by the Khronos Group consortium, which manages other open industry standards such as OpenGL for graphics. OpenCL is a framework and language for parallel programming that takes advantage of heterogeneous processing platforms. The framework allows for parallel programming across a number of devices such as CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators (like the Cell/B.E. SPU). The OpenCL framework and OpenCL C language abstracts the details of the devices enabling programmers to write high performance, portable HPC (High Performance Computing) applications and libraries.

OpenCL includes a language for writing compute kernels and APIs for creating and managing these kernels. The compute kernels are runtime compiled for the targeted device during application execution. This enables the host application to take advantage of all the compute devices in the system with a single set of portable compute kernels.

The OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power consists of the IBM XL C for OpenCL compiler, the OpenCL runtime, sample applications, and user documentation.

How does it work?

OpenCL defines an extended C language for writing compute kernels and a set of APIs for creating and managing these kernels. The compute kernels are compiled, with a runtime compiler, which compiles them on-the-fly during host application execution for the targeted device. This enables the host application to take advantage of all the compute devices in the system with a single set of portable compute kernels.

About the technology author(s)

The OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power and IBM XL C for OpenCL compiler have been developed by teams in IBM consisting of the HPC Multicore Software Development team in Austin TX, Rochester MN and Poughkeepsie NY, the XL C Compiler team in Toronto ON, Canada, with assistance from the Compiler Research team in the Watson Research Lab in Yorktown Heights, NY.

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