Introduction to OpenCL for the KeyStone II

Summary

This chapter introduces a programming model called Open Computing Language (OpenCL). It emphasizes OpenCL for the KeyStone rather than other devices. The main idea for writing an OpenCL application is to be able to execute kernels without having to deal with the details of communication between different cores within a heterogeneous device. OpenCL is the open and royalty‐free programming standard for general‐purpose computations on heterogeneous systems like the KeyStone II. OpenCL offers an ease‐of‐use programming model that can improve the performance while maintaining portability by hiding architecture details. The heterogeneous model used by OpenCL consists of a control processor called a host processor and multiple compute processors called compute devices. Synchronisation can happen at the host level or device level. open specifications for multi‐processing (OpenMP) code can be used for kernels running on the ARM cores or on the digital signal processors (DSPs).