AMD Begins Providing PowerPC Builds Of Their "AOMP" GPU Compiler

AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler for OpenMP and HIP support on GPUs as part of Radeon Open eCosystem 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have begun providing PowerPC 64-bit LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing Radeon GPU compute to happen on POWER9 systems.

As reported on in December, we've been seeing AMDKFD compute driver work for PowerPC that ultimately landed in Linux 5.5. This work has been continuing in user-space with their AOMP GPU compute compiler now also working for PowerPC and AMD even providing PowerPC 64-bit binaries. The actual AOMP lifting for PPC64LE support isn't much considering this compiler is based on LLVM Clang that has long supported the architecture.

With last week's AOMP 0.7-6 release they note that PPC64LE Debian packages are now being spun for Ubuntu 18.04, alongside their x86_64 packages. (Also notable with AOMP 0.7-6 is support for the GFX908/MI100 hardware.)

It's great seeing AMD making these moves as part of their open GPU ecosystem for those that may be wanting to leverage Radeon GPU compute on IBM POWER9 systems. We'll continue monitoring the work as the rest of the user-space stack gets ironed out for POWER.

NVIDIA has provided POWER9 Linux support with their driver stack for graphics and compute given the number of NVIDIA+POWER9 super-computers but there obviously is a completely proprietary driver stack and closed environment compared to AMD Radeon. With ROCm+HIP, it's even possible to transition some of the CUDA application code-bases to running on Radeon hardware.