C++ High Performance

OpenCL

We will not use OpenCL directly in this chapter. However, OpenCL is the underlying framework used by the Boost Compute library that we will use. OpenCL is maintained by the Khronos group, which also maintains OpenGL, and is available for a large number of platforms. Internally, the OpenCL program uses a C99 syntax that it executes on the GPU (just like the OpenGL shaders). The OpenCL shader is passed from your C++ application as a string containing its source code and compiled by the OpenCL when the application executes.

To use OpenCL, you would need to set up custom buffers through a quite complicated state machine, which we will not cover in this book. Instead, we will use Boost Compute to access OpenCL.