Appendix A. Installing and using a software development kit
There’s no getting around it. If you want to build an application based on OpenCL, you need to install a software development kit (SDK). These are freely available as web downloads, but depending on your operating system and hardware vendor, they can be confusing to work with. The goal of this appendix is to help alleviate this confusion. Specifically, this appendix will explain how to obtain, install, and use an SDK capable of running on your system. But first, let’s look at OpenCL SDKs in general.
At the time of this writing, the two most popular OpenCL SDKs are the ones released by AMD and Nvidia. The AMD SDK is called the Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) SDK and the Nvidia SDK is called the GPU Computing SDK. Both companies have released different versions for different operating systems.
Before you install an SDK, there are two points you should be clear on. First, you should know the precise make and model of the hardware you intend to program, and whether it supports OpenCL. Second, you should have a basic understanding of which files in the SDK are important.