[LAD] opencl [was Re: [LAU] ANN: CMKeyboard]

[Patrick Shirkey]

On Tue, December 11, 2012 3:32 am, Bill Gribble wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 02:56 +1100, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>> On Mon, December 10, 2012 10:42 pm, Bill Gribble wrote:
>> We have several headless machines running GPU's with thousands of
>> processing units available.  Much more power than the first "Lord of the
>> Rings" movie was made with.
>
> Good stuff to have available!  Even on a normal laptop with external GPU
> chipset and the builtin Intel one too there's a pretty powerful idle
> processor.  That's why I started getting interested.  Also, I penciled
> out a hardware setup that would allow a laptop to add external PCI
> graphics cards for this purpose, seems like a great choice for
> convolution reverbs, long FIR filters for linear-phase EQ, etc.
>

It's also handy for rendering video graphics and ffmpeg/libavcodec has
some support for accelerated processing too. Blender and Ardour make an
incredibly powerful combination but the complete toolset is just
incredible with a tightly honed cluster.

> I mention interactions because there are a few commercial
> GPU-accelerated audio plugins for Windows (convolution reverb was all I
> could find, can't remember the name offhand), and I spent some time
> scraping forums at the manufacturer, gearslutz, etc for information
> about real-world performance.  The reports were that the latency for
> executing OpenCL kernels was pretty unpredictable, and seemed to be
> related to resource allocation by the desktop OS.  Not an issue in your
> case, nor in any case where you have a dedicated chip (or render farm)
> for your own purposes.
>

We are attempting to push the limits of the software and hardware as much
as possible. One of my priorities is workflow integration. Figuring out
where the holes in the system are and looking at ways to seal them to
increase usability.




--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd