README

These scripts were written as a learning exercise for me to learn OpenCL. 
They were inspired by the excellent _OpenCL Programming Guide_ 
by authors including Apple's Aaftab Munshi, AMD's  Benedict Gaster, 
Intel's Timothy Mattson, NVIDIA's James Fung published July 2011

I've been a fan of Andreas Kloeckner's work since 2009 and PyCUDA.  
PyOpenCL provides a complete set of features for OpenCL 1.1(as of August 2011). 
PyOpenCL provides a fantastic degree of brevity, starkly contrasted to 
the burdensome boilerplate typically required in OpenCL applications written 
with the C API.  I don't exploit all of the possible brevity, but during my learning
phase, I lean on the pythonic wisdom that explicit is better than implicit.  

This doesn't mean that I always go for the lengthiest solution possible, 
but I'm attempting to strike what feels like a natural middle ground 
between the possible verbosity(sometimes good for learners) and ease of coding(good for everyone).

An example of this is that I launch kernels by calling them as methods to the 
OpenCL program object rather than setting their arguments manually and
enqueuing the execution.  

Contents:
    Hello World
        Most of these scripts were written for execution on vertex, one of the most 
        powerful on the UAB hospital network with a dual quad-core Xeon CPU and 
        two NVIDIA GPUs, a Tesla 1060 and one minimal one for the display. 

        There are thus two OpenCL platforms to choose from. Enumerating and querying
        the devices is explored followed by a simple kernel for vector vector addition.
        
    laplace
        Since undergrad, i've repeatedly used a simple Jacobian iteration solution to the laplace 
        equation in order to learn about programming.  This method provides a nice balance
        between a toy learning problem and one with actual use in scientific computing. 
        I implement a steady state solver in two dimensional space using constants
        provided in Chapra's textbook: _Numerical Methods for Engineers_ p. 856
        

August 2011

Robert L. Cloud
rcloud@gmail.com
http://www.robertlouiscloud.com