SYCL Programming Setup and Execution

This project demonstrates a minimal setup for SYCL programming using Intel’s oneAPI DPC++ compiler, avoiding the complexity (and error-prone / misconfigured) use of the provided CMake-based setups in Intel's official samples. The src directory contains the example programs, and the build directory is used for compiling and running them.

Project Structure

• src/: Contains source files with basic SYCL programs:

  • hello_world.cpp: Simple device query and "Hello, World" message.
  • vector_add.cpp: Performs vector addition on the device.
  • mat_mul.cpp: Executes a matrix multiplication on the device.
  • PrefixSum.cpp: Computes the inclusive prefix sum in parallel.

• build/: Folder for executing compilation commands listed below.

Setup Instructions

To get the environment ready for compiling and running SYCL programs, I followed these steps:

1. Install Prerequisites

• Visual Studio Build Tools and Visual Studio: Downloaded from here. Both were necessary to successfully set up the SYCL environment.
• Intel oneAPI Base Toolkit: Downloaded from here. This toolkit includes the DPC++ compiler (dpcpp) used to compile SYCL programs.

2. Set Up VSCode

In Visual Studio Code, select the correct setvars environment by navigating to the path where you installed the oneAPI toolkit into, e.g. ...\Intel\oneAPI\setvars.bat. This script initializes the environment variables required by oneAPI tools:

which is followed by a success message:

3. Compilation and Execution

Intel's provided tutorials at oneAPI-samples were overly complicated for me, using CMake extensively, which often failed to compile examples. I had also tried this VSCode extension without luck.

Instead, I compiled the programs with these straightforward commands:

cd build

dpcpp -o hello_world.exe ..\src\hello_world.cpp
dpcpp -o vector_add.exe ..\src\vector_add.cpp
dpcpp -o mat_mul.exe ..\src\mat_mul.cpp
dpcpp -o PrefixSum.exe ..\src\PrefixSum.cpp

Each command compiles an individual source file to an executable, making the setup simple and quick.

4. Running the Programs

To run any of the executables, navigate to the build directory and execute them as follows:

./hello_world.exe
./vector_add.exe
./mat_mul.exe
./PrefixSum.exe

The output e.g. of hello_world.cpp will indicate which device the code is running on (CPU or GPU), along with a "Hello, World!" message:

Running on 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-13600K
Hello, World!

or

Running on Intel(R) UHD Graphics 770
Hello, World!