SnuCL: A unified OpenCL framework for heterogeneous clusters

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a programming model for heterogeneous parallel computing systems. OpenCL provides a common abstraction layer across general-purpose CPUs and different types of accelerators. Programmers write an OpenCL application once and then can run it on any OpenCL-compliant system. However, to target a heterogeneous cluster, programmers must use OpenCL in combination with a communication library. This chapter introduces SnuCL, a freely available, open-source OpenCL framework for heterogeneous clusters. SnuCL provides the programmer with an illusion of a single, unified OpenCL platform image for the cluster. SnuCL allows the OpenCL application to utilize compute devices in a compute node as though they were in the host node. In addition, SnuCL integrates multiple OpenCL platforms from different vendors into a single platform. It enables an OpenCL application to share OpenCL objects between compute devices from different vendors. As a result, SnuCL achieves high performance and ease of programming for heterogeneous systems.