What kind of applications should be rewritten to use OpenCL? [closed]

Question

Mac OS X 10.6 comes with OpenCL, but how many applications could have better performances if they would be rewritten to use OpenCL? What kind of applications should be rewritten to use OpenCL?

Answer 1

My company is using OpenCL for scientific calculations. While I'm not part of the development team which is using it I can tell you a few things they're using it to do: large scale data processing of images, imagine reconstruction, and massively parallelization of previously written scientific code.

Basically, OpenCL is rather cutting edge. Unless you want to/have to deal with it, it's best left for those that need it. I'm not trying to discourage you but it is a niche product designed for a niche market. You'd be better served studying other areas of programming for potential employment purposes.

Answer 2

OpenCL isn't a magical "increase performance" button. There are several prerequisites that need to be satisfied in order to gain a performance boost, the first one is proper hardware (a Tesla GPU helps). As for software that could benefit from it, it's any software that does a lot of parallel computing. This excludes most "daily" software, and leaves graphics processing applications (renderers, image manipulation programs), large data-processing applications where operation may be parallel, and scientific applications.

Usually if you write a application that can benefit from OpenCL you know that you'll benefit from it already ;).

Answer 3

First of all you can't "rewrite" an entire application using OpenCL. You still need a "normal" language for the GUI etc.

With OpenCL you can accelerate very large data parallel problems. Most problems don't fall into this category.

The most promising candidates are graphics/video and sound processing. But every problem that requires the same operation on a very large set of data will be suitable.