Installation

Installation information is maintained collaboratively on the PyOpenCL Wiki.

Acknowledgments

  • James Snyder provided patches to make PyOpenCL work on OS X 10.6.
  • Roger Pau Monné supplied the example examples/benchmark-all.py.
  • David Garcia contributed significantly to PyOpenCL’s API design and reported many bugs.
  • Michal Januszewski sent a patch.
  • Achim Gottinger submitted a fix for an example.
  • Andrew Karpushin provided a fix for a whole class of crash bugs in PyOpenCL.
  • Paolo Simone Gasparello provided much help in getting OpenCL-OpenGL interoperability to work.

Guidelines

API Stability

I consider PyOpenCL’s API “stable”. That doesn’t mean it can’t change. But if it does, your code will generally continue to run. It may however start spewing warnings about things you need to change to stay compatible with future versions.

Deprecation warnings will be around for a whole release cycle, as identified by the second number in the release name. (the “90” in “0.90”) Further, the stability promise applies for any code that’s part of a released version. It doesn’t apply to undocumented bits of the API, and it doesn’t apply to unreleased code downloaded from git.

Relation with OpenCL’s C Bindings

We’ve tried to follow these guidelines when binding the OpenCL’s C interface to Python:

  • Remove the cl_, CL_ and cl prefix from data types, macros and function names.
  • Follow PEP 8, i.e.
    • Make function names lowercase.
    • If a data type or function name is composed of more than one word, separate the words with a single underscore.
  • get_info functions become attributes.
  • Object creation is done by constructors, to the extent possible. (i.e. minimize use of “factory functions”)
  • If an operation involves two or more “complex” objects (like e.g. a kernel enqueue involves a kernel and a queue), refuse the temptation to guess which one should get a method for the operation. Instead, simply leave that command to be a function.

User-visible Changes

Version 0.92

Note

Version 0.92 is currently under development. You can get snapshots from PyOpenCL’s git version control.

Version 0.91.4

A bugfix release. No user-visible changes.

Version 0.91.3

  • All parameters named host_buffer were renamed hostbuf for consistency with the pyopencl.Buffer constructor introduced in 0.91. Compatibility code is in place.
  • The pyopencl.Image constructor does not need a shape parameter if the given hostbuf has hostbuf.shape.
  • The pyopencl.Context constructor can now be called without parameters.

Version 0.91.2

Version 0.91.1

Version 0.91

Version 0.90.4

  • Add build fixes for Windows and OS X.

Version 0.90.3

  • Fix a GNU-ism in the C++ code of the wrapper.

Version 0.90.2

Version 0.90.1

  • Fix building on the Mac.

Version 0.90

  • Initial release.

Licensing

PyOpenCL is licensed to you under the MIT/X Consortium license:

Copyright (c) 2009 Andreas Klöckner and Contributors.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Frequently Asked Questions

The FAQ is maintained collaboratively on the Wiki FAQ page.