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I'm new to opencl and I'm trying to figure out how to return a variable length array of numbers. (I'm using Cloo for C# .net)

I am doing image processing and I've written a program to look for bubbles in oil. I want to port some of the code to opencl to take advantage of the GPU. I want my opencl function to return a list of co-ordinates and a radius for each bubble. The problem is, since I don't know how many bubbles their will be ahead of time, I seem to need a variable length array. I'm not sure how this is done (or if this can be done) in opencl.

EDIT

Alternatively, if there is a way to exchange datastructures between the GPU and the host, this would work too. However from what I've read from other people's experiences, this doesn't sound like it has been a good option.

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  • $\begingroup$ @Denis: We encourage programming questions here, as long as it is stated in the context of a computational science problem. This question mentions an image processing (which is part of computational science), so it seems on-topic to me. $\endgroup$
    – Geoff Oxberry
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:25
  • $\begingroup$ @Geoff, sure, try both sites. Would a tag "programming" help programmer / mathematicians to search here ? $\endgroup$
    – denis
    Nov 21, 2013 at 13:41
  • $\begingroup$ @Denis: For a question marked "OpenCL", I don't think a programming tag is necessary, and a "programming" tag may be undesirable if it becomes a meta-tag. $\endgroup$
    – Geoff Oxberry
    Nov 21, 2013 at 22:44

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Since buffer's sizes fixed at the moment they created, the only way is to simulate variable length arrays: Create an array of maximum size and use an extra variable so that OpenCL-kernel can store how much of this (max)array is in use.

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