If you are developing, testing, or using OpenCL applications, you are likely aiming to harness the power of heterogeneous computing. OpenCL enables the acceleration of general-purpose workloads by executing them on the GPU, but what about workloads within a virtual machine? Is it possible to leverage OpenCL to accelerate those workloads on the physical GPU? And how would one achieve this?
This blog post examines VirtIO-GPU, a VirtIO-based graphics adapter, and VCL, an OpenCL driver by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. for VirtIO-GPU. Using VCL, you can leverage the host’s graphics hardware to speed up OpenCL applications in guest virtual machines.