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Bacon

An optimizing front-end for OpenCL-compatible GPU programming

Summary

Bacon is a GPU programming language that compiles to OpenCL kernel code and automatically generates a wrapper that allows it that kernel to be called from C++ or from any language supported by SWIG via C++.

Bacon provides three key advantages over writing OpenCL C code directly:

1. Nicer syntax, including consistent indexing for multi-dimensional arrays and images.
2. Automatic generation of interface code.
3. JIT specialization, enabling optimizations such as loop unrolling and constant propagation.

Bacon assumes that user kernels will be run many times on input data of the same shape by generating specialized OpenCL code for specific input sizes at runtime. This makes sense for some applications (like image processing) but makes no sense for some other applications. This functionality will likely be made optional in future versions, but now that I've documented it that makes it a feature.

Currently Bacon is only known to work with the AMD APP SDK, which provides OpenCL support for both AMD Radon GPUs and any x86 or amd64 CPUs. Support for the Nvidia implementation is planned. Support for other implementations is not a priority.

Documentation

• Intro to Parallel GPU Programming with Bacon
• Installation instructions

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, maybe Debian, or a desire to install a bunch of dependencies by hand.
• AMD APP SDK

GIT Repo

git clone http://code.ferrus.net/compilers/bacon.git

Papers

A draft paper on Bacon is available.

Feedback

I can be reached by email at ntuck☃cs.uml.edu.

If you get it working, let me know. If it's useful, let me know. If you have suggestions, let me know. If you have patches, then you're awesome.

If you actively want to help, the most useful thing would be writing new example kernels. More examples means more things to test compiler changes on to detect both improvements and regressions.