Ok so I figured it out. Also, it was NOT rocket-science :/
The link (OpenCL On ubuntu 16.04, Intel Sandy Bridge CPU) I followed earlier was perfect since I was working on a Xeon machine. It would not have worked (big surprise!) on my Laptop since it obviously isn't a Xeon machine.
I needed to use the sdk for linux which is available after filling out the form. Once the form is filled out you get redirected to a page where you can choose the product and the version and download either a .gz file or a .tgz file. The .tgz is for the Yocto OS but during installation you can run it without any loss of generalization for Ubuntu 16.04.
The installation is fairly simple since there is an extremely handy executable install.sh shell script to use.
The general steps to follow are:
extract the folder
tar -xzvf intel_sdk_for_opencl_2017_yocto_7.0.0.2567_x64.tgz
run the shell script
./install.sh
follow the instructions
The output of the python script then shows:
============================================================
OpenCL Platforms and Devices
============================================================
Platform - Name: Intel Gen OCL Driver
Platform - Vendor: Intel
Platform - Version: OpenCL 1.2 beignet 1.1.1
Platform - Profile: FULL_PROFILE
beignet-opencl-icd: no supported GPU found, this is probably the wrong opencl-icd package for this hardware
(If you have multiple ICDs installed and OpenCL works, you can ignore this message)
============================================================
Platform - Name: Experimental OpenCL 2.1 CPU Only Platform
Platform - Vendor: Intel(R) Corporation
Platform - Version: OpenCL 2.1 LINUX
Platform - Profile: FULL_PROFILE
--------------------------------------------------------
Device - Name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz
Device - Type: CPU
Device - Max Clock Speed: 2500 Mhz
Device - Compute Units: 4
Device - Local Memory: 32 KB
Device - Constant Memory: 128 KB
Device - Global Memory: 8 GB
Device - Max Buffer/Image Size: 1962 MB
Device - Max Work Group Size: 8192
============================================================
Platform - Name: Intel(R) OpenCL
Platform - Vendor: Intel(R) Corporation
Platform - Version: OpenCL 2.0
Platform - Profile: FULL_PROFILE
--------------------------------------------------------
Device - Name: Intel(R) HD Graphics
Device - Type: GPU
Device - Max Clock Speed: 1000 Mhz
Device - Compute Units: 23
Device - Local Memory: 64 KB
Device - Constant Memory: 3209904 KB
Device - Global Memory: 6 GB
Device - Max Buffer/Image Size: 3135 MB
Device - Max Work Group Size: 256
--------------------------------------------------------
Device - Name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz
Device - Type: CPU
Device - Max Clock Speed: 2500 Mhz
Device - Compute Units: 4
Device - Local Memory: 32 KB
Device - Constant Memory: 128 KB
Device - Global Memory: 8 GB
Device - Max Buffer/Image Size: 1962 MB
Device - Max Work Group Size: 8192
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