dOpenCL: Towards uniform programming of distributed heterogeneous multi-/many-core systems

• dOpenCL is a novel uniform programming approach for heterogeneous distributed systems.
• Unmodified legacy OpenCL applications become executable on distributed systems.
• CPUs, GPUs, and other devices are efficiently shared in multi-user environments.

Modern computer systems become increasingly distributed and heterogeneous by comprising multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Current programming approaches for such systems usually require the application developer to use a combination of several programming models (e.g., MPI with OpenCL or CUDA) in order to exploit the system’s full performance potential. In this paper, we present dOpenCL (distributed OpenCL)—a uniform approach to programming distributed heterogeneous systems with accelerators. dOpenCL allows the user to run unmodified existing OpenCL applications in a heterogeneous distributed environment. We describe the challenges of implementing the OpenCL programming model for distributed systems, as well as its extension for running multiple applications concurrently. Using several example applications, we compare the performance of dOpenCL with MPI + OpenCL and standard OpenCL implementations.