“AMD has been away from the HPC space for a while, but now they are coming back in a big way with an open software approach to GPU computing. The Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) was born from the Boltzmann Initiative announced last year at SC15. Now available on GitHub, the ROCm Platform bringing a rich foundation to advanced computing by better integrating the CPU and GPU to solve real-world problems.”
AMD Boltzmann Initiative Promotes HPC Freedom of Choice
August 7, 2016 by
AMD’s motivation for developing these open-source GPU tools is based on an opportunity to remove the added complexity of proprietary programming frameworks to GPU application development. “If successful, these tools – or similar versions – could help to democratize GPU application development, removing the need for proprietary frameworks, which then makes the HPC accelerator market much more competitive for smaller players. For example, HPC users could potentially use these tools to convert CUDA code into C++ and then run it on an Intel Xeon co-processor.”
