NEW ORLEANS, La., Nov. 17 — The OpenACC standards group today announced that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and PathScale, Inc., have joined the organization, aligning with 18 other members and supporters worldwide to drive the development of applications for accelerator-enabled supercomputers, clusters and other high performance computing (HPC) systems.

OpenACC provides an efficient and performance-portable path for developing massively parallel programs across a wide range of accelerators, including GPUs, many core coprocessors and multi-core CPUs. By joining the OpenACC standards group, AMD and PathScale bring considerable expertise in high performance computing technology and programming capabilities, providing developers with more diversity and choice in computing architectures and software tools, and promising to extend the reach of OpenACC-supported solutions to new and existing users worldwide.

Expert OpenACC members will be on hand at the Supercomputing Conference (SC14) in New Orleans, Louisiana USA this week, to answer OpenACC programming questions, discuss the latest developments, and provide technology demos. For more information visit the OpenACC booth (#657) or the OpenACC website: http://www.openacc.org/SC14.

OpenACC Simplifies Applications Acceleration on AMD APUs

Advanced Micro Devices is a leading multinational semiconductor company with vast experience in energy-efficient high-performance computing. The OpenACC standard helps programmers take full advantage of AMD’s high-performance Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

“The HPC community is driving the need for rich heterogeneous computing solutions to better meet customer performance and power needs. With this transition there is a strong need for a rich, simplified programing model to support new heterogeneous application development and pull in legacy C/C++/Fortran applications,“  said Greg Stoner,  senior director of Developer Technology, Professional Graphics, AMD, and newly appointed member of the OpenACC board of directors. “OpenACC 2.0 via its single source directives-based programming model puts in place a solid foundation to drive key benefits of a heterogeneous hardware platform. AMD is looking forward to working with the OpenACC organization to help it to continue to evolve this important programming standard.

PathScale Joins OpenACC

PathScale is the developer of innovative ENZO 2014 compilers that enhance the performance and energy efficiency of accelerated Linux HPC clusters and systems. By supporting the OpenACC standard, PathScale provides users with more options and flexibility to choose the ideal compiler solution that fits their individual needs.

“It is important in any HPC development environment to have access to a variety of compilers,” noted Oscar Hernandez, principle investigator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Sometimes one compiler will exhibit better performance on a particular code than another, or behave in a more desirable way. We fully intend to make PathScale available to developers creating applications for ORNL’s Titan Cray XK7 supercomputer.”

OpenACC Events at SC14

OpenACC members are participating in number of presentations, talks and discussions at SC14 on the latest developments. They will also provide technology demonstrations in a variety of member booths, including demonstrations of the latest OpenACC features as developed for the next major release of the popular open-source GCC compiler.

For more information about OpenACC demonstrations and events visit http://www.openacc.org/SC14

Key OpenACC events at SC14 include:

• Workshop—“Workshop on Accelerator Programming Using Directives” — Monday, Nov. 17, 2014, 8am to 5pm in Rooms 276 and 277.
• Tutorial— “OpenACC: Product, Portable Performance on Hybrid Systems using High Level Compilers and Tools” — Monday, Nov. 17, 8am to 5pm in Room 396.
• OpenACC Birds of a Feather (BoF) session— “OpenACC API User Experience, Vendor Reaction, Relevance and Roadmap” — Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014 at 5:30pm in Rooms 275/276/277. BoF highlights will include reports on the recent hackathon at ORNL, the first OpenACC Seismic workshop at the University of Houston, and recent progress in implementing and enhancing the OpenACC standard.

The OpenACC standard simplifies the programming of accelerated-computing systems through the use of directives, enabling application developers worldwide to easily take advantage of the transformative power of these systems to drive advances in science, engineering and industry.  It is now available in compiler products from many leading compiler vendors and is supported in a wide range of debuggers, profilers and other programming tools.

About the OpenACC Standards Group

OpenACC is a non-profit corporation that created and fosters a cross-platform API which allows any scientist or programmer to more easily accelerate applications on modern many-core and multi-core processors. OpenACC directives identify compute-intensive code to a compiler for acceleration or offload, while preserving a single code base and cross-platform portability. OpenACC is complementary to and interoperable with existing programming models, including OpenMP, MPI, CUDA and OpenCL. Organizations actively involved in high-performance heterogeneous computing are encouraged to participate. Please visit http://www.openacc.org for more information.

About AMD

AMD is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its groundbreaking AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD’s server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD’s superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers. For more information, visit www.amd.com.

About PathScale

PathScale Inc. has developed industry leading high performance Fortran, C and C++ compiler products for AMD, Intel and NVIDIA processors. The PathScale compiler technology has the world’s most advanced optimization infrastructure and can fully exploit the potentials of many-core and heterogeneous architectures. The company’s goal is to deliver robust and high performance compilers tailored to clustered, GPGPU and multi-core computing environments. More information about PathScale is available on the web at http://www.pathscale.com

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Source: OpenACC Standards Group