Complete .NET OpenCL Implementations [closed]

Question

I've been looking all over but have had little luck. Are there any well documented .NET binding implementations for OpenCL? (I'd take something for CUDA if I had to). I've run into a variety of implementations, CUDA.NET, OpenCL.NET, OpenTK / Cloo (I know, they are mentioned often of stackoverflow), but they all seem to either be in alpha stage or have absolutely no available examples. CUDA.NET has some help files, but it's just a library reference, which doesn't really help you get started.

What I'm hoping to find is a mature library for GPU programming in .NET. Eventually I need to be able to write the code in F#, but I would take any .NET compliant language as I could always just convert it later and use whatever examples are included to get up and running.

Probably a long shot since I've searched all over, but I'm hoping this is just one of those case where I don't know the right thing to search for.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, all libraries you've stated are simple wrappers for opencl native libraries. They pose relatively small amount of additional abstractions and are very close to general opencl functions. So if you are familiar with opencl in general you will get familiar with these libraries in no time.

I think the 'OpenCL.NET' implementation is complete, it is free of anything that is not OpenCL. But after using it several times I've found it too low level.

I've created my own wrapper it serves me good job by simplifying the host part dramatically here's the host part of one of my projects (if you are interested I can publish my OpenCl wrapper in github or any other svn service):

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;

using Shared;
using Shared.IO;
using Shared.OpenCL;

namespace Testing
{
    public class ApplicationClass
    {
        static Random rand = new Random();

        static Single[] RandomArray(Int32 length)
        {
            Single[] result = new Single[length];

            for (int i = 0; i < result.Length; i++)
            {
                result[i] = (Single)rand.NextDouble();
            }

            return result;
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            DeviceGlobalMemory output = new Byte[4096];

            DeviceGlobalMemory indeces = RandomArray(102400);
            DeviceGlobalMemory ops = new Byte[3072];
            DeviceGlobalMemory data = RandomArray(1048576);

            Console.Write("Creating kernel...");

            Kernel kernel = Kernel.Create("Kernel", File.ReadAllText("Test.c"), data, indeces, ops, output);

            Console.Write("Executing kernel...");

            Event e = kernel.Execute(256, 256);

            kernel.CommandQueue.Finish();

            Console.WriteLine("done, operation took {0}", Profiler.DurationSeconds(e));

            UnmanagedReader reader = new UnmanagedReader(new DeviceBufferStream(output));

            for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
            {
                if (i % 4 == 0) Console.WriteLine();
                if (i % 16 == 0) Console.WriteLine();

                Console.Write("{0}\t", reader.Read<Single>());
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

There's another bindings library from OpenTK http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloo/.

They position it as "It provides a much cleaner OpenCL API compared to raw bindings (which are also available in case you need them)" and "Cloo is an open source, easy to use, managed library which enables .NET/Mono applications to take full advantage of the OpenCL framework."

The samples look very promising.

Answer 3

I also have a set of open source OpenCL bindings for. NET. I wrote this for myself primarily so it would mirror the OpenCL API faithfully while being .NET friendly. There will never be any OOP abstractions for this library, and it's quite performant.

http://openclnet.codeplex.com

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I have used some different C# OpenCL wrappers over the years and am using NOpenCL now. It is well written and is under the MIT License.

https://github.com/tunnelvisionlabs/NOpenCL