A Case Study on SYCL™ Productivity With a Realtime 3D Fluid Simulation Miniapp

15 September 2021



SYCL Summer Sessions 2021

Tom Lin, University of Bristol

Developer productivity is one of the core factor influencing the success of a software project. SYCL represents a huge improvement on the productivity front over traditional platforms such as OpenCL: with improved type safety and simplified kernel-host API.

In this talk, I'll present an interactive realtime 3D fluid simulation miniapp implemented using the Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method with surface reconstruction via Marching Cubes (MC) and Metaballs. The simulation covers both traditional HPC workloads (SPH) with a focus on realtime visualisation (MC).

The miniapp is first implemented using OpenCL 1.2, where I progressively present the changes needed to port the miniapp to SYCL. I'll compare performance results on different SYCL implementations and provide a summary on productivity improvements with the reduced SLOC (lines of code) needed for SYCL.

Codeplay Software Ltd has published this article only as an opinion piece. Although every effort has been made to ensure the information contained in this post is accurate and reliable, Codeplay cannot and does not guarantee the accuracy, validity or completeness of this information. The information contained within this blog is provided "as is" without any representations or warranties, expressed or implied. Codeplay Sofware Ltd makes no representations or warranties in relation to the information in this post.
Rod Burns's Avatar

Rod Burns

VP Ecosystem