Hi everybody,

I am a master's student, I study at University of São Paulo (USP) - Brazil. Here we have an Stratix V development kit. I would like to use OpenCL for a research project, but I read that I need the custom platform. Is there any place that I could get this custom platform? I don't have any experience with this, and since the project needs the co-design of hardware and software I can't spend much time creating such platform. On the Altera OpenCL website I found ®Stratix ®V Network Reference Platform (s5_net). Is there any easy way to modify it to work on our development kit? I hope I had been clear about my problem.


Carlos.

Have you checked out this project? It looks like the developer may have some background, and may also appreciate any contributions you might do as part of your project.

Dan

Hi Carlos,

No, you don't need the custom Altera platform to get started with OpenCL. However, I've found that for FPGA development, it's always faster to start with a developers kit that already supports the technology that I'm interested in rather than trying to port something right away. I use the cheap Cyclone-V SoC boards from terasic for my current Altera development platform.

If you are insistant on using your existing in-house Altera Stratix-V development kit, then you should get "Altera SDK for OpenCL Custom Platform Toolkit User Guide.pdf", it's found at the following url:

https://www.altera.com/products/design-software/embedded-software-developers/opencl/developer-zone.html#Custom

You don't really need Altera FPGA specifically for OpenCL.

OpenCL is platform and OS independent, you can run it on Windows, Linux or Android. That is to say, if you don't have time for hardware design, you should consider using a different implementation of OpenCL that runs on your GPU instead of a FPGA. The following is a list of url's that will assist you:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-opencl

http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/

http://arrayfire.com/getting-started-with-opencl-on-android/

https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl



I hope that helps,
Good Luck,
Richard.