HPCwire has learned that HPC compiler company PathScale has fallen on difficult times and is asking the community for help or actively seeking a buyer for its assets. A letter from the company with a listing of assets is included at the end of the article.

PathScale represents one of handful of compiler technologies that are designed for high performance computing, and it is one the last independent HPC compiler companies. In an interview with HPCwire, PathScale Chief Technology Officer and owner Christopher Bergström attributes the company’s financial insolvency to its heavy involvement in Intel alternative architectures.

“Unfortunately in recent years, we bet big on ARMv8 and the partner ecosystem and the hardware has been extremely disappointing,” said Bergström. “Once partners saw how low their hardware performed on HPC workloads they decided to pull back on their investment in HPC software.”

Due to confidentiality agreements, he’s limited to speaking in generalities but argues that the currently available ARMv8 processors deliver very weak performance for HPC workloads.

“ARM is possibly aware of this issue and as a result has introduced SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions),” Bergström told us. “Unfortunately, they focused more on the portability side of vectorization and the jury is still out if they can deliver competitive performance. SVE’s flexible design and freedom to change vector width on the fly will possibly impact the ability to write code tuned specifically for a target processor. In addition, design of the hardware architecture blocks software optimizations that are very common and potentially critical for HPC. And based on the publicly available roadmaps, the floating point to power ratio is not where it needs to be for HPC workloads in order to effectively compete against Intel or GPUs.”

Before coming to these conclusions, PathScale had a statement of work contract with Cavium to help support optimizing compilers for their ThunderX processors. When that funding was pulled, PathScale also lost their ability to gain and support customers for ARMv8. They looked for funders, and had conversations with stakeholders in the private and public sphere, but the money just wasn’t available.

“Show me a company in the HPC space wanting to invest,” said Bergström, “They’re not investing in compiler technology.”

ARM, which was scooped up by Japanese company SoftBank in September 2016 for $31 billion, may be the exception, but according to Bergström the PathScale technology, while it significantly leverages LLVM, doesn’t perfectly align with what they need.

Bergström brokered the deal with Cray that resurrected PathScale from the ashes of SiCortex in 2009 (more on this below) and he’s proud of what he and his team have accomplished over the last seven years. “We love compilers, we love the technology. We want to continue developing this stuff. The team is rock solid, we’re like family. We live eat and breathe compilers, but we’re not on a sustainable business path and we need a bailout or help refocusing. We need people who understand that these kind of technologies add value and LLVM by itself isn’t a panacea.”

Addison Snell, CEO of HPC analyst firm Intersect360 Research, shared some additional perspective on the market dynamics at play for independent tools vendors. “In the Beowulf era, clusters were all mostly the same, so what little differentiation there was came from things like development environments and job management software,” he said. “Independent middleware companies of all types flourished. Now we’re trending back toward an era of architectural specialization. Users are shopping for architectures more than they’re shopping for which compiler to use for a given architecture, and acquisitions have locked up some of the previously dominant players. Vendors’ solutions will have their own integrated stacks. Free open-source versions might still exist, but there will be less room for independent middleware players.”

PathScale has a winding history that dates back to 2001 with the founding of Key Research by Lawrence Livermore alum Tom McWilliams. The company was riding the commodity cluster wave, developing clustered Linux server solutions based on a low-cost 64-bit design. In 2003, contemporaneous with the rising popularity of AMD Opteron processors, Key Research rebranded as PathScale and expanded its product line to include high-performance computing adapters and 64-bit compilers.

PathScale would then pass through a number of corporate hands. In 2006, QLogic acquired PathScale, primarily to gain access to its InfiniBand interconnect technology. The following year, the compiler assets were sold to SiCortex, which sought a solution for its MIPS-based HPC systems.

When SiCortex closed its doors in 2009, Cray bought the PathScale assets and revived the company. Under an arrangement struck with Cray, PathScale would go forward as an independent technology group with an option to buy. In March 2012, PathScale CTO Christopher Bergström acquired all assets and became the sole owner of PathScale Inc.

The PathScale toolchain currently generates code for the latest Intel processors, AMD64, AMD GPUs, Power8, ARMv8, and NVIDIA GPUs in combination with both Power8 and x86.

In a message to the community, Pathscale writes:

We are evaluating all options to overcome this difficult time, including refocusing to provide training and code porting services instead of purely offering compiler licenses and optimization services. Our team deeply understands parallel programming and whether you have crazy C++ or ancient Fortran, we can likely help get it running on GPUs (NVIDIA or AMD) or vectorization targets (like Xeon Phi).

All PathScale engineers would love to continue to work on the compiler as an independent company, but we need the community to help us. We need people who believe in our technical roadmap. We need people who understand the future exascale computing software stack will likely be complex, but that complexity and advanced optimizations will make it easier for end users. At the same time we must be realistic and without immediate assistance start accepting any reasonable offer on the assets as a whole or piece by piece.

Our assets include:

  • PathScale website, trademarks and branding

  • C, C++ and Fortran compilers

  • Complete GPGPU and many-core runtime which supports OMP4 and OpenACC and is portable across multiple architectures (NVIDIA GPU, ARMv8, Power8+NVIDIA and AMD GPU)

  • Significant modifications to CLANG and LLVM to enable support for OpenACC and OpenMP and parallel programming models.

  • Complete engineering team with expertise working on CLANG and LLVM and MIPSPro.

  • Advertising credits with popular websites ($30,000)

A purchase or funding from crowdsourcing or other community event will keep a highly optimizing OpenMP and OpenACC C/C++ and Fortran compiler toolchain plus experienced development team in operation. Succinctly, PathScale preserves architectural diversity and opens the door for competition with a performant compiler for interesting architectures with OpenMP and OpenACC parallelization.

If interested please contact [email protected].

Editor’s note: HPCwire has reached out to Cavium and ARM and we will update the article with any responses we receive.