Board Support Package for OpenCL

The only boards with existing official OpenCL support are the Stratix V and Arria 10 reference boards from Altera and a few boards from Terasic, Bittware, Nallatech and Gidel which are also mostly based on Stratix V, Arria 10 and Cyclone V SoCs. The two boards you mentioned more than likely do not have existing support for OpenCL. Creating an OpenCL BSP is not at all a simple task and can only be done by people with years of experience in hardware design and hence, only companies that can sell a lot of boards will attempt to spend resources on creating a BSP for their boards.

Thanks for the response. I also found a stratix v gx fpga development kit (https://www.altera.com/products/boards_and_kits/dev-kits/altera/kit-sv-gx-host.html). Seems I can use that. Does the s5_ref BSP work with this board? Or should I approach Intel/Altera for a BSP?

That is one their Stratix V reference boards, though I am not sure if it will work with the reference BSP. The FPGA listed in the hardware specs of their BSP is "5sgsed8k2f40c2", but I cannot find any development kits from Altera with that FPGA on it. The reference BSP is included in all recent versions of Quartus. Try to see if the BSP works with your board by compiling the hello_world OpenCL example and running it on the board. If it didn't, you can contact Altera directly and see if they have a BSP for that specific board.

The good folks at Terasic and Altera/Intel came to the rescue. Terasic provided me with an old version of the DE4-530 OpenCL BSP for 11.0 of Quartus and Altera/Intel provided me with an older version of the BSP for the Stratix V GX that seems to work for 16.0 of Quartus! Unfortunately, I gave them the wrong board number :oops:. It was supposed to be the Stratix V Advanced Systems Development Kit. So, now I have to go back and ask them for the right BSP. There seems to be a PD version of the BSP for Arria V GX board that seems to work for V15.0 of Quartus. Modifying that to work with the Arria V GT shouldn't be a problem.

Interesting; so these people have some unreleased/private BSPs that they would make available to public upon request.

The DE4 board was the first board they used with doing the compiler in 2012-13. If you look in hdl/ip you will see all the built-in functions that are used by the compiler. These ip may call out megawizards for use by the compiler. Supporting a device family is a lot of work so they don't support the S4 anymore. The s5_ref is a board that had lots of resources so they use that board as a reference as you can rip out what your board does not use. Mainly when porting you have to get the memories and PCIe pin numbers correct and then do a good layout and keep floating out of the center. The s5_ref has PCIe, DDR3. There is a s5_net that also has QDRII, and channels for ethernet connections. If you are just looking for a board to learn OpenCL on try a c5soc board. They're fun!

I would venture the most users of these boards are NOT using them for OpenCL use, but rather for FPGA code development in Verilog/VHDL. For OpenCL I would likely just go for a high-end graphics card that has an OpenCL package rather than an FPGA board.

The limited availability of OpenCL support on FPGAs is most certainly not aimed at new learners, I am afraid. The current OpenCL support is aimed at long-time FPGA developers to help them reduce development time, and long-time OpenCL developers with no hardware knowledge who now at least have the possibility of using FPGAs.

The main reason to use OpenCL is to avoid the usage of VHDL/Verilog for FPGA development and bringing it more into the mainstream development as you indicated HRZ. With over 30 years of software product development, I would not sell a product to my clients knowing that they would need to go through hoops and hurdles to get my software running, especially after charging them thousands of dollars for it (our software costs hundreds of thousands of dollars!).