GPT and Parmance announce milestone in open source project to ease adoption of heterogeneous systems

TARRYTOWN, N.Y., Feb. 13, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- General Processor Technologies and Parmance today jointly announced a major milestone in their open source gccbrig project designed to overcome barriers to open parallel computing. The latest development provides for HSAIL compilation (finalization) to any platform supporting GCC (GNU Compiler Collection).

The two companies collaboratively released in April 2016 a BRIG (a binary format) language front-end to GCC. BRIG is a binary representation of HSAIL (HSA Intermediate Language), a virtual instruction set specified by HSA (heterogeneous system architecture) for heterogeneous parallel computing.

The compiler front-end has now officially been upstreamed in the GCC project, which means that future GCC releases (starting from the upcoming 7.0 release) will include the HSAIL 1.0 base profile finalization support out of the box. This support, combined with the previously released portable HSA runtime (phsa-runtime) open source project, is a valuable addition to the HSA community. It allows those considering adding HSA support in their GCC-supported processing platforms to greatly lower their software stack development costs.

"Given how widespread the GCC compiler framework is among the industry, we believe this is a great milestone in lowering the adoption costs of HSA for hardware platform vendors," said Dr. John Glossner, CEO of GPT and President of the HSA Foundation.

Glossner added that the goal of the project was to achieve interoperability in parallel computing, which has been historically problematic due to proprietary tools and a diverse set of high-level programming languages. Both GPT and Parmance are strong supporters of an open source approach to bringing the benefit of high-performance, heterogeneous computing to developers.

"We are proud to see the BRIG support being accepted in the GCC mainline. Knowing the strict standards of GCC, we consider this is an approval of the quality of the frontend implementation. Its upstreaming helps greatly in maintaining and developing the code base, and spreading HSAIL finalization support to new users," said the primary developer of the frontend, Dr. Pekka Jääskeläinen, CEO of Parmance.

About GPT
General Processor Technologies (GPT) is the US division of HuaXia General Processor Technologies Inc. GPT designs and licenses embedded HSA-compatible processors for use worldwide. Best known for building multithreaded vector Digital Signal Processors (DSP) for wireless communications, GPT also licenses cores for use in machine vision, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M), consumer electronics, and deep learning. GPT's patent-pending Unity architecture allows customers to optimize cores for a range of applications and easily integrates into heterogeneous systems providing power-efficient computing and software reuse. For more information, please visit www.generalprocessortech.com.

About Parmance
Parmance, based in Tampere, Finland, provides a wide variety of software engineering services – some of these include compiler development, runtime development and performance engineering. The company's specialists have extensive expertise with heterogeneous parallel computing, processor architectures, instruction-set simulators, and compilers. For more information, log on to www.parmance.com.

Contact Information:
General Processor Technologies
Ran Zhou
120 White Plains Road, 4th Floor
Tarrytown, NY 10591
Phone: +1.914.287-8500 ext. 561
Fax: +1.914.287-8501
[email protected]
http://www.GeneralProcessorTech.com

SOURCE General Processor Technologies