PortableCL 1.2 Still Coming While POCL 1.3 Will Further Improve Open-Source OpenCL

It's been a number of months since last having any major news to report on POCL, the "PortableCL" project providing a portable OpenCL/compute implementation that can run on CPUs, select GPUs, and other accelerators.

POCL 1.1 from March remains the current stable release while POCL 1.2 has been in the release candidate stage. The POCL 1.2 release candidates began last month with a few highlights like LLVM 7.0 support, device-side printf support, and HWLOC 2.0 library support.

More exciting is POCL 1.3 that remains in the early stages of development. With POCL 1.3 there is going to be initial albeit experimental support for native-ISA compilation on top of the HSA run-time rather than targeting the HSA IL intermediate layer. POCL 1.3 will also fix device driver init/reinit initialization, support for building POCL without host CPU devices, usage of the Clang driver API for initiating the final linking step, and other changes.

Those curious about the current Portable Computing Language can visit PortableCL.org and/or POCL on GitHub. The project also announced today about a modified POCL stack being used for OpenCL with China's NUDT Matrix-2000 accelerator that was used as a replacement to Intel Xeon Phi hardware within the TianHe-2 supercomputer.