Alessio Sclocco

I am finally publishing my master’s degree thesis, whose title is “Radio astronomy beam forming on GPUs“, on this website. The thesis describes all the work I did on the LOFAR beam former and is one of the starting points of the work I am currently doing at the VU (more on this in the future).

The thesis can be downloaded here in pdf format. I want to thank my supervisors for the great work they did helping me in this project. All the mistakes and errors are, of course, mine.

In September I was porting to OpenCL a version of the radioastronomy beam forming algorithm I realized in CUDA for my master project. The algorithm needs to clean the memory after some iterations, and with CUDA I was using the memset function to do it. Unluckily, OpenCL does not provide a function like memset, so I had to write a kernel to accomplish the task.

Now, it is clear that writing a kernel like this is one of the easiest tasks ever :), and is a one-liner BTW, but as always I’d like to share the code with the Internet, cause it’s always useful to find some example code on-line, especially when you are in a hurry.

__kernel void memSet(float value, __global float *mem) {
    mem[get_global_id(0)] = value;
}

As can be seen, the memory to clean was an array of float values, but changing it to work with other data types is trivial.