Some notes on setting up OpenCL

[w34]

Hi there,

I've spent a couple of hours on setting up OpenCL on my machine, which is a Ubuntu guest running inside Virtualbox on a Mac with an older Core 2 Duo.
The information in the slides was helpful, but I thought I'd post my findings here anyway.

On recent Ubuntu versions (I'm running 13.04), OpenCL headers can be installed with a simple

sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

You still need a OpenCL driver though and this is where things get complicated. As I'm running in a virtual machine I was looking for a simple CPU driver.

According to the lecture notes and their website http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sdk-for-opencl-applications-2013-release-notes#_Installation_Notes, the drivers that ship with Intel current SDK only support relatively new CPUs, including Xeon Core processors supporting SSE 4.2.

AMD's APP, however, does not only support AMD CPUs and GPUs, it can also be used in conjunction with older Intel CPUs. This is what I currently use to run OpenCL on my Intel CPU.

A very good tutorial on how to setup OpenCL can be found here http://mhr3.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/opencl-on-ubuntu-1304.html, which also includes instructions on how to setup Intel's and AMD's SDK.

A few sample applications to make sure you've set up OpenCL properly can be found on this website: http://wiki.tiker.net/OpenCLHowTo#Testing, under Testing.

[jmespadero]

On modern Ubuntu you can install the complete SDK, including clinfo executable and C++ headers with:

sudo apt install clinfo ocl-icd-libopencl1 ocl-icd-opencl-dev opencl-headers opencl-clhpp-headers