Possible to use OpenCL on multi-computers?

Question

As far as I know, the answer is no. OpenCL is designed for multi-cores system.

But, is there any way to use OpenCL on multi-computers ( each computer is a multi-cores system ) ? If not, are any additional tools, frameworks... required?

I read some articles about Distributed computing, Cluster computing, Grid computing... but I can't find a satisfied answer

Any ideas will be appreciated

Thank you :)

Answer 1

There are two frameworks for this purpose: VirtualCL and CLara. Both packages let you work transparently with remote machines as local devices. Unfortunately, VirtualCL is only available as pre-compiled binaries without sources and CLara is not actively developed anymore.

Answer 2

SnuCL uses MPI and OpenCL to transparently use the cluster through the OpenCL API. It also adds a few OpenCL extensions to effectively deal with the memory objects.

It is open source. See http://aces.snu.ac.kr/Center_for_Manycore_Programming/SnuCL.html and http://tbex.twbbs.org/~tbex/pad/SunCL.pdf

Answer 3

There is one more solution not mentioned above: dOpenCL.

"dOpenCL (distributed OpenCL) is a novel, uniform approach to programming distributed heterogeneous systems with accelerators. It transparently integrates the nodes of a distributed system into a single OpenCL platform. Thus, dOpenCL allows the user to run unmodified existing OpenCL applications in a heterogeneous distributed environment. Besides, it extends the OpenCL programming model to deal with individual nodes of the distributed system."

Answer 4

I have used VirtualCL to form a GPU cluster with 3 AMD GPU as compute node and my ubuntu intel desktop running as broker node. I was able to start both the broker and compute nodes.

Answer 5

In addition to the various options already mentioned by other posters, here are two more open source projects that you may be interested in:

• ocland (in beta stage): offers a server application and an ICD implementation that the clients can use to take advantage of local and remote devices that support OpenCL in a transparent fashion. The license is GPLv3.

• COPRTHR SDK by Brown Deer Technnology (currently version 1.6): this SDK which offers an open source (GPLv3) OpenCL implementation for x86_64, ARM, Epiphany and Intel MIC includes a "Compute Layer Remote Procedure Call" implementation. This consists of a client-side OpenCL implementation that supports rpc (libclrpc) and a server application (clrpcd). The website doesn't mention much about it but the documentation contains a section about this CLRPC implementation.