OpenCL Programming Guide

Chapter 4. Programming with OpenCL C

The OpenCL C programming language is used to create programs that describe data-parallel kernels and tasks that can be executed on one or more heterogeneous devices such as CPUs, GPUs, and other processors referred to as accelerators such as DSPs and the Cell Broadband Engine (B.E.) processor. An OpenCL program is similar to a dynamic library, and an OpenCL kernel is similar to an exported function from the dynamic library. Applications directly call the functions exported by a dynamic library from their code. Applications, however, cannot call an OpenCL kernel directly but instead queue the execution of the kernel to a command-queue created for a device. The kernel is executed asynchronously with the application ...