A technical blog from Daniel Rákos (aka aqnuep)
Multiprocessing
Texture and buffer access performance
Nov 2nd
Currently there are several ways to feed data to the GPU no matter of what API we use and what type of application we develop. In case of OpenGL we have uniform buffers, texture buffers, texture images, etc. The same is true for OpenCL and other compute APIs that even provide more fine-grained memory management taking advantage of the local data store (LDS) available on today’s hardware. In this article I’ll present the memory access performance characteristics of AMD’s Evergreen-class GPUs focusing on what this all means from OpenGL point of view. While most of the data is about the HD5870, the general principles and relative performance characteristics are valid for other GPUs, including ones from other vendors.
Synchronizable objects for C++
Feb 2nd
Previously I talked about how one can easily take advantage of multiprocessing using OpenMP. Even if the C pragmas introduced by the parallel programming API standard is very straightforward for simple programs, it simply doesn’t fit nicely in a complex C++ application that is built from the ground with the OOP in mind. To smoothly introduce OpenMP into such projects one need higher level constructs that hide the actual implementation details. This is the first article of a series that will try to provide reference implementations of such an abstraction. First, we will start with synchronizable primitives that try to reflect the functionality provided by the “synchronized” statement of Java.
Exploit parallelism with the least effort
Jan 19th
Multiprocessing has been there for decades as a premium feature for enterprise applications but adopting this technology still brings huge burden to software companies that still maintain and develop legacy code. Nowadays, as most commodity hardware already have highly parallelized architectures, a modern application is almost unimaginable without proper multi-threading capabilities even if we talk about text editor or a multimedia application. The transition from traditional software development to multiprocessing is not an easy and painless task. Fortunately we have such tools in our hand like OpenMP.