[LLVMdev] Portable Computing Language (pocl) v0.11 released!

[Pekka Jääskeläinen]

Pocl's goal is to become an efficient open source (MIT-licensed)
implementation of the OpenCL standard (both 1.x and 2.x).

In addition to producing an easily portable open-source OpenCL
implementation, another major goal of this project is improving
performance portability of OpenCL programs with compiler
optimizations, reducing the need for target-dependent manual
optimizations.

At the core of pocl is the kernel compiler that consists of a set of
LLVM passes used to statically transform kernels into work-group
functions with multiple work-items, even in the presence of work-group
barriers. These functions are suitable for parallelization in multiple
ways (SIMD, VLIW, superscalar,...).

This release adds:
  * kernel compiler support for LLVM/Clang 3.6,
  * caching of compiled OpenCL kernels
  * initial Android support
  * experimental Windows support (many things still broken there)
  * two new examples, Cloverleaf and Halide, updated AMDSDK examples
  * better debugging possibilities
  * initial MIPS architecture support

We consider pocl ready for wider scale testing, although the OpenCL
standard is not yet fully implemented, and it contains known bugs.
The pocl test suite compiles and runs most of the ViennaCL 1.5.1
examples, Rodinia 2.0.1 benchmarks, Parboil benchmarks, OpenCL
Programming Guide book samples, VexCL test cases, Luxmark v2.0,
most of the AMD APP SDK v2.9 OpenCL samples and piglit OpenCL tests
among others.

Acknowledgements
----------------

We'd like to thank Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation
(project "Parallel Acceleration 2", funding decision 40115/13), Academy
of Finland (funding decision 253087) and ARTEMIS joint undertaking under
grant agreement no 641439 (ALMARVI) for funding the development of
this release.

A pocl developer E. Schnetter acknowledges support from the Perimeter
Institute, as well as funding from NSERC (Canada) via a Discovery Grant 
and from NSF (USA) via OCI Award 0905046.

Links
-----
Home page:         http://portablecl.org/
This announcement: http://portablecl.org/downloads/ANNOUNCEMENT
Change log:        http://portablecl.org/downloads/CHANGES
Download:          http://portablecl.org/downloads

-- 
Pekka