Virtual network-remote OpenCL library. Cloned from https://sourceforge.net/projects/clara/ Note: This is preliminary documentation. Things are subjected to changes.
=== Introduction ===
CLara is a distributed OpenCL implementation. It consists of three components:
- a reverse proxy server (clarad)
- an OpenCL platform provider (clarac)
- an OpenCL application library (libclara)
The major goal of CLara is to be able to execute OpenCL applications on hosts that doesn't have a GPGPU-capable graphics adapter or configuration.
At first you install and run the reverse proxy server on an arbitrary host in the network. The next step is to start the OpenCL provider software on the hosts that have an GPGPU-capable device installed. The provider requires the vendor-specific OpenCL library on these machines. It connects to the reverse proxy that will provide the OpenCL device to so called consumers. The consumer is your OpenCL application that you may have already written and compiled. You need to link it to the CLara library that will handle the communication with the reverse proxy and the provider. The following drawing shows the components and layers of this model:
[ NVIDIA GeForce device ] [ ATI Radeon device ] [ IBM CELL device ]
[ NVIDIA CUDA ] [ ATI Stream ] [ libspe2 ]
[ NVIDIA OpenCL ] [ AMD OpenCL ] [ IBM OpenCL ]
[ ####### clarac ####### ] [ ##### clarac ##### ] [ #### clarac #### ]
| | |
| | |
\ | /
_____________________ | ___________________/
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
[ +++ clarad +++ ]
/ |
/ |
/ | _
/ |
/ |
[ **** libclara **** ] [ **** libclara **** ] [ **** libclara **** ]
[ OpenCL application ] [ OpenCL application ] [ OpenCL application ]
=== Installation ===
The source tree consists of several directories. There are three directories called 'provider', 'agent' and 'consumer'.
Change to the directory of the component that you want to install on the local machine and type:
$ ./configure $ make $ su
- The provider installs 'clarac' to /usr/local/bin.
- The agent installs 'clarad' to /usr/local/bin.
- The consumer installs headers to /usr/local/include and the library 'libclara.so' to /usr/local/lib.
=== Usage ===
Start the agent on the host that acts as reverse proxy:
$ /usr/local/bin/clarad
Execute the provider tool on the host that have a GPGPU-capable device and let it connect to the agent, in this example 192.168.4.42.
$ /usr/local/bin/clarac -a 192.168.4.42
On the host that executes the OpenCL application set these two environment variables to configure the location of the agent:
$ export AGENT_ADDR=192.168.4.42 $ export AGENT_PORT=52428
Compile your OpenCL application with the following options:
-I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lclara
or pre-load the library if it is already compiled and linked:
env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libclara.so ./your-application
That's it. The application should run within the limits of CLara. These limits are:
- no image support yet
- no clEnqueueNativeKernel
- no clMap* functions
Keep also in mind that CLara is far away from being mature. It's in pre-alpha state.
--
Bjoern Koenig Berlin, Germany 2010-02-20