[llvm-dev] Portable Computing Language (pocl) v0.12 released

[Pekka Jääskeläinen via llvm-dev]

Pocl's goal is to become a performance portable open source (MIT-licensed)
implementation of the OpenCL standard.

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.

Release highlights:

  * support for HSA-compliant devices (tested with AMD Kaveri's GPU)
    - for installation steps & current status, please see the HSA section
      in Pocl documentation: http://www.portablecl.org/docs/html/hsa.html
  * Little endian MIPS32 now passes almost all tests
  * kernel compiler support for LLVM/Clang 3.7
  * improved caching of compiled OpenCL kernels

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.

Note: 0.12 is the last version that builds with older LLVM versions.
We plan prune code needed to support for the old versions in the next
release and focus on the current stable version and possibly the
previous one for easier transition.

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. Special thanks to HSA Foundation who sponsors the work on
implementing the HSA support.

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