Improving OpenCL programmability with the Heterogeneous Programming Library

Abstract

The use of heterogeneous devices is becoming increasingly widespread. Their main drawback is their low programmability due to the large amount of details that must be handled. Another important problem is the reduced code portability as most of the tools to program them are vendor or device-specific. The exception to this observation is OpenCL which largely suffers from the reduced programmability problem mentioned particularly in the host side. The Heterogeneous Programming Library (HPL) is a recent proposal to improve this situation as it couples portability with good programmability. While the HPL kernels must be written in a language embedded in C++ users may prefer to use OpenCL kernels for several reasons such as their growing availability or a faster development from existing codes. In this paper we extend HPL to support the execution of native OpenCL kernels and we evaluate the resulting solution in terms of performance and programmability achieving very good results.