Learning OpenCL

OpenCL is an industry standard for writing parallel programs to execute on heterogeneous platforms. These platforms are here today and, as we hope we have shown you, will be the dominant architecture for computing into the foreseeable future. Hence, programmers need to understand heterogeneous platforms and become comfortable programming for them.

In this chapter we have provided a conceptual framework to help you understand OpenCL. The platform model defines an abstraction that applies to the full diversity of heterogeneous systems. The execution model within OpenCL describes whole classes of computations and how they map onto the platform model. The framework concludes with programming models and a memory model, which together give the programmer the tools required to reason about how software elements in an OpenCL program interact to produce correct results.