dOpenCL: towards a uniform programming approach for distributed heterogeneous multi-/many-core systems

c©2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. DOI: 10.1109/IPDPSW.2012.16 Abstract—Modern computer systems are becoming increas-ingly heterogeneous by comprising multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Current programming approaches for such systems usually require the application developer to use a combination of several programming models (e. g., MPI with OpenCL or CUDA) in order to exploit the full compute capability of a system. In this paper, we present dOpenCL (Distributed OpenCL) – a uniform approach to programming distributed heterogeneous systems with accelerators. dOpenCL extends the OpenCL standard, such that arbitrary computing devices installed on any node of a distributed system can be used together within a single application. dOpenCL allows moving data and program code to these devices in a transparent, portable manner. Since dOpenCL is designed as a fully-fledged implementation of the OpenCL API, it allows running existing OpenCL applications in a heterogeneous distributed environment without any modifi-cations. We describe in detail the mechanisms that are required to implement OpenCL for distributed systems, including a de-vice management mechanism for running multiple applications concurrently. Using three application studies, we compare the performance of dOpenCL with MPI+OpenCL and a standard OpenCL implementation