GCC 9.0 Sees A Number Of BRIG Improvements For HSA

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 5 May 2018 at 06:44 AM EDT. 1 Comment
GNU
Being very early in the GCC 9.0 development cycle following the GCC 8 stable release earlier this week, a number of BRIG front-end improvements have landed. BRIG as a reminder is the binary form for HSA IL.

In January of 2017 is when the GCC BRIG support landed in time for GCC 7. With the GCC 8 release there are some BRIG improvements for this compiler's HSA support, but nothing really too notable. Sadly, since this code has been merged, I haven't heard of any major users of this code intended for supporting HSA accelerators with AMD seemingly divesting in HSA.

Those unfamiliar with the GCC HSA/BRIG efforts can see this 2015 presentation from the GNU Cauldron on the topic.

But as a good sign the code is still moving forward, a number of BRIG commits were merged over the past day. A list of the GCC BRIG activity can be found via this Git query. This was the first activity on BRIG since January.

Most notable of this latest work is support now for whole program optimizations. These latest improvements come courtesy of Parmance, a parallel performance engineering consulting firm, while the other work on BRIG over the past year has been largely thanks to Red Hat and Linaro.
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