[pocl-devel] Portable Computing Language (PoCL) v1.6 released

[Pekka J. <pek...@tu...>]

PoCL is a portable open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the
OpenCL standard (1.2 with some 2.0 features supported). In addition to
being an easily portable multi-device (truely heterogeneous)
open-source OpenCL implementation, a major goal of this project is
improving interoperability of diversity of OpenCL-capable devices by
integrating them to a single centrally orchestrated platform. Also
one of the key goals longer term is to enhance performance portability
of OpenCL programs across device types utilizing runtime and compiler
techniques.

Upstream PoCL currently supports various CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs via libcuda,
HSA-supported GPUs and TCE ASIPs (experimental, see:
http://openasip.org). It is also known to have multiple (private) 
adaptations in active production use.

Release Highlights
------------------

* Support for Clang/LLVM 11.0
* Improved CUDA performance and features
* Improved PowerPC support
* Enhanced OpenCL debugging usage
* Improved packaging support

Misc. Notes
-----------

* Please note that there's an official PoCL "maintenance policy" in
place. This text describes the policy and how you can get your favourite
project that uses OpenCL to remain regression free in the future PoCL
releases: http://portablecl.org/docs/html/maintainer-policy.html

* We are still looking for an ARM CPU maintainer, if you are interested
putting in a bit of effort to make PoCL great(er) for ARM CPU devices,
please let us know!

* Same goes for the RISC-V CPU device support.

* After a long while we have settled on the writing format of the
project name abbreviation: The preferred one is PoCL, but the lower
case 'pocl' remains as the secondary "old school" spelling form ;-)

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

The CUDA improvements, PowerPC support and packaging support
described in this post were made by Isuru Fernando and Matt Wala
with assistance from Nick Christensen, and Andreas Klöckner,
all part of the Department of Computer Science at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The work was partially supported
through awards OAC-1931577 and SHF-1911019 from the US National
Science Foundation, as well as award DE-NA0003963 from the US Department
of Energy.

Customized Parallel Computing (CPC) research group of Tampere
University, Finland leads the development of PoCL on the side and for
the needs of their research projects. This project has received funding
from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 783162 
(FitOptiVis). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme and Netherlands, Czech Republic, 
Finland, Spain, Italy. It was also supported by European Union's Horizon 
2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 871738
(CPSoSaware) and HSA Foundation.

The financial support is very much appreciated -- it keeps the open 
source project going!

Links
-----
Release web page:  http://portablecl.org/pocl-1.6.html
This announcement: http://portablecl.org/downloads/ANNOUNCEMENT
Change log:        http://portablecl.org/downloads/CHANGES
Download:          http://portablecl.org/download.html

-- 
Pekka