OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

Compute space and work groups

The number of invocations of a compute shader is governed by the user-defined compute space. This space is divided into a number of work groups. Each work group is then broken down into a number of invocations. We think of this in terms of the global compute space (all shader invocations) and the local work group space (the invocations within a particular work group). The compute space can be defined as a one-, two-, or three-dimensional space.

Technically, it is always defined as a three-dimensional space, but any of the three dimensions can be defined with a size of one (1), which effectively removes that dimension.

For example, a one-dimensional compute space with five work groups and three invocations per ...