Using Eclipse to develop OpenCL code on the Parallella

[nickoppen]

I've just written a beginner's guide on what you need to do to get a basic program using the stdcl library running on the Parallella using Eclipse.



If I've left anything out please let me know.

nick

[aolofsson]

A fantastic post! Thank you for writing it. I am sure lots of people will find it useful.

Some comments:

-In section 2.2, you mention that the Epiphany doesn't have a debugger? Not sure what you meant, but Epiphany does support most of gdb's functionality. Did you try using the "e-gdb". Through the e-gdb, you can load code, execute,single step, variable monitoring, etc. You can even use it as a console to catch printf output.

-A multi-core friendly updated debugger has been in development since January and is getting very close to release. (~4 weeks away). The new debugger will support controlling all epiphany cores through a single e-gdb client and will also support asynchronous debugging mode. This should make debugging complete OpenCL applications significantly easier!

-Thanks to Ericsson there is also an advanced Parallella specific multicore debugging CDT for Eclipse. We'll work on getting this posted asap.

Fulfilling Kickstarter/pre-order commitments and getting Parallella into production has been our first priority over the last 2 years. Now that folks like yourself are starting to use the platform our first priority is to make the platform easier to use.

Thanks,
Andreas

[nickoppen]

Thanks Andreas.

That's great news. For some reason e-gdb hadn't registered with me... I've seen it mentioned in posts but for some reason the two thoughts, "I need to debug" and "there is a thing called e-gdb" had not collided yet.

I'll update my current post and get going on writing a debug specific one.

nick