[LA-SiGMA-gpu] LSU join OpenACC

[Jian Tao]

Hi All,

It is not official yet but the news that LSU (initiated by CCT) recently 
became an OpenACC member has been leaked in an HPCWire article on the 
latest development of OpenACC-enabled compilers.
http://www.hpcwire.com/2013/11/14/openacc-broadens-appeal-gcc-compiler-support/

In addition to being informed of the latest development of the OpenACC 
standard and implementations, we believe the membership is also helpful 
to establish connections and encourage collaborations among the 
institutes that are interested in heterogeneous computing.

OpenACC ( http://www.openacc-standard.org 
<http://www.openacc-standard.org/>) is a non-profit corporation founded 
by the group of companies that developed the OpenACC Application Program 
Interface specification. OpenACC was formed to help create and foster a 
cross platform API that would allow any scientist or programmer to 
easily accelerate their application on modern many-core and multi-core 
processors using directives.

At LSU, there have been some activities, and success stories about 
OpenACC as you might have heard from the our past talks. Another 
important reason that some of us here at CCT are interested in OpenACC 
is that an OpenACC code could potentially be compiled and launched on 
Xeon Phi with a reasonable performance without any changes to the code. 
Of course, OpenACC is not panacea. An OpenACC code will not get the 
performance of the code written in CUDA or OpenCL in general. However, 
in some applications where the numerical kernels sit in a few loops, the 
performance difference is very small. Another catch is that  
applications rely heaviely on external libraries won't be able to use 
OpenACC since function calls to precompiled libraries won't be launched 
on accelerators. Thus it is not possible to port such applications to 
accelerators with OpenACC.

Regards,
Jian
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