[pocl-devel] Portable Computing Language (PoCL) v3.1 released

[Jan S. (TAU) <jan...@tu...>]

PoCL is a portable open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the
OpenCL standard. It likely supports the minimal v3.0 feature set (official
conformance stamp not yet applied for).

In addition to being an easily portable multi-device (truly
heterogeneous) open-source OpenCL implementation, a major goal of the
project is improving interoperability for diversity of OpenCL-capable
devices by integrating them to a single centrally orchestrated platform.
Another key goal 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,
Vulkan-compatible GPUs (experimental) and 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 15.0
* Much improved SPIR-V support for CPU and CUDA drivers
* Major rework of the custom device driver (formerly named Accel, now AlmaIF)
  with support for more device types implementing AlmaIF
* Various improvements to the work-in-progress Vulkan driver
* Basic implementation of cl_khr_command_buffer

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 looking for ARM CPU and RISC-V CPU maintainers (and any other
target of your interest). If you are interested in ensuring PoCL stays
stable for these processor architectures in the future, please contact us.

* The dedicated TTASim driver will be deprecated once the AlmaIF driver
reaches feature parity with it.

* Support for LLVM versions below 10 will be removed in the next
release. If you rely on these versions, please let us know.

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

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 European
Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant
Agreement No 871738 (CPSoSaware), Academy of Finland (decision #331344) and
Business Finland's AISA project.

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

Links
-----
Release web page:  http://portablecl.org/pocl-3.1.html

--
Jan