General Processor Technologies and Parmance announced Monday a major milestone in their open source gccbrig project designed to overcome barriers to open parallel computing. The latest development provides for HSAIL compilation (finalization) to any platform supporting GCC (GNU Compiler Collection).
The two companies collaboratively released last April a BRIG (a binary format) language front-end to GCC. BRIG is a binary representation of HSAIL (HSA Intermediate Language), a virtual instruction set specified by HSA (heterogeneous system architecture) for heterogeneous parallel computing.
This project aims to achieve interoperability in parallel computing, which has been historically problematic due to proprietary tools and a diverse set of high-level programming languages. Both GPT and Parmance are strong supporters of an open source approach to bringing the benefit of high-performance, heterogeneous computing to developers.
General Processor Technologies (GPT) is the US division of HuaXia General Processor Technologies Inc. GPT designs and licenses embedded HSA-compatible processors for use worldwide. Best known for building multithreaded vector Digital Signal Processors (DSP) for wireless communications, GPT also licenses cores for use in machine vision, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M), consumer electronics, and deep learning.
GPT’s patent-pending Unity architecture allows customers to optimize cores for a range of applications and easily integrates into heterogeneous systems providing power-efficient computing and software reuse.
The compiler front-end has now officially been upstreamed in the GCC project, which means that future GCC releases (starting from the upcoming 7.0 release) will include the HSAIL 1.0 base profile finalization support out of the box. This support, combined with the previously released portable HSA runtime (phsa-runtime) open source project, is a valuable addition to the HSA community. It allows those considering adding HSA support in their GCC-supported processing platforms to greatly lower their software stack development costs.
“Given how widespread the GCC compiler framework is among the industry, we believe this is a great milestone in lowering the adoption costs of HSA for hardware platform vendors,” said Dr. John Glossner, CEO of GPT and President of the HSA Foundation.
“We are proud to see the BRIG support being accepted in the GCC mainline. Knowing the strict standards of GCC, we consider this is an approval of the quality of the frontend implementation. Its upstreaming helps greatly in maintaining and developing the code base, and spreading HSAIL finalization support to new users,” said the primary developer of the frontend, Dr. Pekka Jääskeläinen, CEO of Parmance.
