CodeSourcery Has Ported OpenMP / OpenACC To AMD GCN GPUs With GCC

While we have seen AMD GCN and HSA support in the past for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) we have unfortunately not heard of it being used much, but now CodeSourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working on a new/updated AMD GCN port for execution on Radeon GPUs that allows for OpenMP and OpenACC offloading.

Andrew Stubbs of CodeSourcery has completed work on a GCN3/GCN5 port for running OpenMP/OpenACC offloaded kernels on the likes of AMD Fiji and Vega graphics cards. They are using the GCC compiler although for now rely upon LLVM for the AMDGPU Assembler and Linker support with there being no AMD GCN support currently in GNU Binutils.

The current code is re-based against GCC 7.3, but the compiler company is now looking to upstream their work. They are hoping to get the basic GCN support in soon followed by their OpenMP/OpenACC work, etc. They have laid out their basic plans for upstreaming via this mailing list post on the GCC mailing list.

It will be interesting to try it out once it's upstreamed, but CodeSourcery also plans on making a binary release soon that should make things easier for those wanting to try out this OpenACC/OpenMP Radeon offloading.