Code never runs for arrays larger than 8000 entries with errors - opencl

Question

I just started building a code for parallel computation with OpenCL.
As far as I understand, the data generated from CPU side (host) is transffered through the buffers (clCreateBuffer -> clEnqueueWriteBuffer -> clSetKernelArg, then processed by the device).
I mainly have to deal with arrays (or matrices) of large size with double precision.
However, I realized the code never runs for arrays larger than 8000 entries with errors.
(This makes sense because 64kb is equivalent to 8000 double precision numbers.)
The error codes were either -6 (CL_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY) or -31 (CL_INVALID_VALUE).
One more thing when I set the argument to 2-dimensional array, I could set the size up to 8000 x 8000.
So far, I guess the maximum data size for double precision is 8000 (64kb) for 1D arrays, but I have no idea what happens for 2D or 3D arrays.
Is there any other way to transfer the data larger than 64kb?
If I did something wrong for OpenCL setup in data transfer, what would be recommended?

Answer 1

I appreciate your kind answer.
The hardware that I'm using is Tesla V100 which is installed on the HPC cluster in my school.
The following is a part of my code snippet that I'm testing the data transfer.
bfr(0) = clCreateBuffer(context,
& CL_MEM_READ_WRITE + CL_MEM_COPY_HOST_PTR,
& sizeof(a), c_loc(a), err);
if(err.ne.0) stop "Couldn't create a buffer";
err=clEnqueueWriteBuffer(queue,bfr(0),CL_TRUE,0_8,
& sizeof(a),c_loc(a),0,C_NULL_PTR,C_NULL_PTR)
err = clSetKernelArg(kernel, 0,
& sizeof(bfr(0)), C_LOC(bfr(0)))
print*, err
if(err.ne.0)then
print *, "clSetKernelArg kernel"
print*, err
stop
endif
The code was build by Fortran with using clfortran module.
Thank you again for your answer.

Answer 2

You can do much larger arrays in OpenCL, as large as memory is abailable. For example I'm commonly working with linearized 4D arrays of 2 Billion floats in a CFD application.
Arrays need to be 1D only; if you have 2D or 3D arrays, linearize them, for example with n=x+y*size_x for 2D->1D coordinates. Some older devices only allow arrays 1/4 the size of the device memory. However modern devices typically have an extension to the OpenCL specification to enable larger buffers.
Here is a quickover view on what the OpenCL C bindings do:
clCreateBuffer allocates memory on the device side (video memory for GPUs, RAM for CPUs). Buffers can be as large as host/device memory allows or on some older devices 1/4 of device memory.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer copies memory over PCIe from RAM to video memory. Both on CPU and GPU side buffers must be allocated beforehand. There is no limit on transfer size; it can be as large as the entire buffer or only a subrange of a buffer.
clSetKernelArg links the GPU buffers to the Input parameters of the kernel, so it knows which kernel parameter corresponds to which buffer. Make sure data types of the buffers and kernel arguments match as you won't get an error if they don't. Also make sure the order of kernel arguments matches.
In your case there are several possible causes for the error:
Maybe you have integer overflow during computation of the array size. In this case use 64-bit integer numbers instead to compute the array size/indices.
You are out of memory because other buffers already take up too much memory. Do some bookkeeping to keep track on total (video) memory utilization.
You have selected the wrong device, for example integrated graphics instead of the dedicated GPU, in which case much less memory is available and you end up with cause 2.
To give you a more definitive answer, please provide some additional details:
What hardware do you use?
Show a code snippet of how you allocate device memory.
UPDATE
I see some errors in your code:
The length argument in clCreateBuffer and clEnqueueWriteBuffer requires the number of bytes that your array a has. If a is of type double, then this is a_length*sizeof(double), where a_length is the number of elements in the array a. sizeof(double) returns the number of bytes for one double number which is 8. So the length argument is 8 bytes times the number of elements in the array.
For multiple flags, you typically use bitwise or | instead of +. Shouldn't be an issue here, but is unconvenional.
You had "0_8" as buffer offset. This needs to be zero (0).
const int a_length = 8000;
double* a = new double[a_length];
bfr(0) = clCreateBuffer(context, CL_MEM_READ_WRITE|CL_MEM_COPY_HOST_PTR, a_length*sizeof(double), c_loc(a), err);
if(err.ne.0) stop "Couldn't create a buffer";
err = clEnqueueWriteBuffer(queue, bfr(0), CL_TRUE, 0, a_length*sizeof(double), c_loc(a), 0, C_NULL_PTR, C_NULL_PTR);
err = clSetKernelArg(kernel, 0, sizeof(bfr(0)), C_LOC(bfr(0)));
print*, err;
if(err.ne.0) {
print *, "clSetKernelArg kernel"
print*, err
stop
}