OpenCL

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OpenCL, (Open Computing Language)

an open standard for cross-platform, task-based as well as data-based parallel programming of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, DSPs, including the C99 based programming language OpenCL C. OpenCL C forbids recursion, and omits function pointers, bit fields and variable-length arrays, but has fixed-length vector types, supporting SIMD instructions if available on the target platforms. OpenCL 2.0 adds features like nested parallelism and shared virtual memory, version 2.1 extends OpenCL C to a subset of C++14. OpenCL 3.0 makes version 1.2 functionality a mandatory baseline with 2.x and 3.x as optional features and replaces ‘OpenCL C++’ with ‘C++ for OpenCL’ as a subset of C++17. OpenCL is maintained by the nonprofit technology consortium Khronos Group, adopted by Apple [1], Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia, Altera, Samsung, Vivante, Imagination Technologies and ARM.

OpenCL to Vulkan

The OpenGL graphics API specified by Khronos Group is deprecated in favor for Vulkan, since Vulkan and OpenCL v1.2/v2.x share SPIR-V as an intermediate representation it is possible to cross-compile OpenCL code via SPIR-V to run on Vulkan enabled devices [2].