PathScale Open-Sources The EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite

Beyond maintaining the EKOPath 4 compiler suite, PathScale also offers the ENZO 2011 and EKOPath Boost products. ENZO is a GPGPU/multi-core solution designed for NVIDIA Tesla hardware with CUDA support for compiling HMPP C, C++, and Fortran. EKOPath Boost is the Boost Libraries that are built with EKOPath. The licensing on ENZO 2011 and EKOPath Boost have not changed, but this announcement is just concerning EKOPath 4.

EKOPath is based on the Pro64 compiler and development on this commercial compiler began in 2005. In early 2011 was when EKOPath version 4 was released.

This is not just a one-time effort by PathScale in an attempt to appear open-source friendly, but three weeks ago in cooperation with the FreeBSD and NetBSD foundations, they released a new C++ runtime. PathScale put out a copy of their libcxxrt C++ run-time under the BSD license for these operating systems to use free of charge. Thanks to their interest in GPGPU computing, they've also been the ones heavily participating in the Nouveau driver project to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's Linux driver. They offered free GeForce Fermi cards to developers and ultimately forked the Nouveau kernel driver to create the PSCNV driver, which is focused on being high-performance and for suiting the needs of GPGPU computing on an open-source stack.

Obviously, soon as we have finished testing this free EKOPath 4 compiler, you can expect to see a number of benchmarks showing how this high-performance compiler compares to GCC, LLVM, Open64, et al. Here though are some initial performance figures from an advanced build of EKOPath that we had received from PathScale prior to its public availability.

This initial testing is quite simple and was done using the Phoronix Test Suite to compare the stock GCC 4.5.2 from Ubuntu Natty to EKOPath / PathScale Compiler Suite 4.0.10 on an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook. sThere are also EKOPath benchmarks from an AMD Opteron workstation.

The EKOPath compiler was nearly 40% faster than the GNU Compiler Collection for this ray-tracing benchmark.