OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first royalty-free standard for cross platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers, mobiles, and embedded devices. OpenCL greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories, from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. OpenCL has proved itself to be versatile in that it now runs on not only operating systems like Windows and Linux powered by Intel and AMD processors, but also on low power chips like ARM, and it has also been adopted by processor manufacturers like ARM Corp, Vivante, and Altera, among others.

Research in parallel programming has been a mainstream topic for a decade, and will continue to be so for many decades to come. Many parallel programming standards and frameworks exist, but only take into account one type of hardware architecture. Today computing platforms come with many heterogeneous devices. OpenCL provides royalty free standard to program heterogeneous hardware.

Heterogeneous Computing with OpenCLteaches OpenCL and parallel programming for complex systems that may include a variety of device architectures: multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and fully-integrated Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) such as AMD Fusion technology. Designed to work on multiple platforms and with wide industry support, OpenCL will help you more effectively program for a heterogeneous future.

OpenCL in Action blends the theory of parallel computing with the practical reality of building high-performance applications using OpenCL. It first guides you through the fundamental data structures in an intuitive manner. Then, it explains techniques for high-speed sorting, image processing, matrix operations, and fast Fourier transform. The book concludes with a deep look at the all-important subject of graphics acceleration. Numerous challenging examples give you different ways to experiment with working code.