Best approach for GPGPU/CUDA/OpenCL in Java?

java cuda gpgpu opencl
Frederik picture Frederik · Apr 13, 2010 · Viewed 46.2k times · Source

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is a very attractive concept to harness the power of the GPU for any kind of computing.

I'd love to use GPGPU for image processing, particles, and fast geometric operations.

Right now, it seems the two contenders in this space are CUDA and OpenCL. I'd like to know:

  • Is OpenCL usable yet from Java on Windows/Mac?
  • What are the libraries ways to interface to OpenCL/CUDA?
  • Is using JNA directly an option?
  • Am I forgetting something?

Any real-world experience/examples/war stories are appreciated.

Answer

zOlive picture zOlive · Jul 22, 2010

AFAIK, JavaCL / OpenCL4Java is the only OpenCL binding that is available on all platforms right now (including MacOS X, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris, all in Intel 32, 64 bits and ppc variants, thanks to its use of JNA).

It has demos that actually run fine from Java Web Start at least on Mac and Windows (to avoid random crashes on Linux, please see this wiki page, such as this Particles Demo.

It also comes with a few utilities (GPGPU random number generation, basic parallel reduction, linear algebra) and a Scala DSL.

Finally, it's the oldest bindings available (since june 2009) and it has an active user community.

(Disclaimer: I'm JavaCL's author :-))

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