Raphael Hiesgen: OpenCL-based Actors in C++

While modern CPUs moved towards multiple cores, GPUs developed from fixed purpose pipelines to clusters of data-parallel programable units. This highly parallel hardware is no longer reserved for graphics, but is available for any general purpose calculation that can be mapped to this architecture. When it comes to performance, GPUs outperform their CPU equivalents for several use cases. Since not all problems profit from a high amount of parallelism, it is often beneficial to use a heterogeneous approach. In this talk, we present our work that aims to integrate GPGPU programming into libcppa. We introduce OpenCL-enabled actors, which offer an easy way to run code on GPUs. OpenCL is a standard for cross-platform, parallel programming. This enables the development of heterogeneous application with libcppa without a shift in paradigms. In addition these actors keep the benefits from libcppa, e.g., network-transparency, but also offer hardware-transparency - an OpenCL-enabled actor can be addressed like any other actor and responds in the same way, i.e., via message-passing.

slides