🔒 Locked

Filling opencl buffer/image with zeros

Started by zerorepent Mar 20, 2013 at 9:33 AM 1 replies 9.5k views

Original Post

Mar 20, 2013 at 9:33 AM

Hi!

What is the way to fill a opencl buffer (or texture) with zeros?


cl_int errorCode;
float arg = 0; //or a larger datastructure/type
errorCode = m_Queue->enqueueFillBuffer<float>(destinationBuffer,arg,0,size,NULL,0);

This operation seems really wasteful, but maybe I'm wrong? Is it perhaps better to use map/unmap and memset with zeros?

For example I want to create a buffer of size x, fill it with z amounts of data (z

Bacterius

Mar 20, 2013 at 10:46 AM

What do you mean by wasteful? the enqueueFillBuffer functions are really self-documenting, they are meant to be used to fill buffers. Mapping and unmapping is another option, but the problem is that your memory usage spikes up if your buffer is large, unless you do it in small increments in which case you end up calling the API a lot which can also hurt (and isn't very elegant).

Of course, it's only available under OpenCL 1.2, so if that's the only 1.2 feature you're using it might make more sense to use a less modern approach and just implement the fill function yourself (it's actually not too hard, just enqueueWriteBuffer the given pattern over the entire buffer, just remember to use CL_FALSE for non-blocking writes, for the love of god).

Another option is to write a kernel designed to set buffers to zero, which might actually win out to every other approach bar zero-copy memory for large buffers on hardware devices (like GPU's) but this is very inelegant and tedious in terms of implementation. Though I'm not exactly sure how the enqueueFillBuffer is implemented, perhaps it uses that under the hood when appropriate.

Also, don't make the mistake I did. Don't foolishly memset an array of floats to zero. When I did that, it set them all to NaN in the OpenCL kernel for some reason

zerorepent

Mar 20, 2013 at 11:08 AM

wasteful might have been a poor choice of words, but what I mean is that since I'm not using complex pattern, i.e. just filling with zero using fill seems a bit overkill.

The Buffer sizes is in ranges between ~64KB and ~128MB. Using a small pattern a float seems to be rather inefficient because even if it zero:ed it still need to do size/4 memcopies. Thats why I thought maybe using unmap/map and memset might be faster, I guess my best option is to time it and compare. (or something similar to that)

Topic Locked

This topic has been locked by a moderator. New replies are not allowed.