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hey yes nice :-) but after this we still need openCL ...
Would OpenCL run at the speed of the card or at the speed of the driver optimizations? (ignoring that it has to pass through some software layers to get to the card)
OpenCL kernels running on the GPU should not be impacted by driver optimization while they are running on the GPU, right?
At least this time it's software that's already compatible with Linux, unlike the Lightworks video editor, which we probably won't see natively supported on linux for another 5-10 years.
My first impression was also that this was some cpu+gpu thing (opencl) but given the information people have offered on this thread it certainly seems to be ekopath. As a compiler nerd I'm excited! Also the himeno pressure test benchmark looked impressive but:
A) unless my memory fails me, the himeno pressure test has given the largest differences in earlier benchmarks, meaning that it's hardly representative of the general result you'll get when compiling with ekopath but rather a cherry-picked result.
B) 'GCC compatible' doesn't necessarily mean that it can compile everything which can be compiled with GCC, just look at ICC and even DragonEgg which uses the GCC frontend and yet fails to compile a ton of stuff, not to mention Clang etc. The kernel in particular depends greatly on GCC compiler extensions (not surprisingly since the kernel devs themselves requested most of those compiler extensions).
Still, another open source compiler suite is GREAT, currently we have GCC, Clang/LLVM, Open64 etc, and now hopefully we can add another strong compiler suite to that list, looking forward to future benchmarking.
So, if this is indeed true, thanks PathScale!
On another note, I wonder what licence it will land under. I assume that there will still be a commercial version available?
given that this beast is a number one choice for supercomputers
I would hardly say it's the number one choice. It is a popular choice, yes, but number 1, doubtful. It's competing very heavily with both PGI and Intel, both of which have a very strong HPC presence.
Personally I like working with the PathScale compilers very much. In addition to pruducing good fast code, the compile times tend to be very fast as well. The Intel compiler also does tend to produce ~ 30% faster code than gcc for me (mostly numerical and imaging processing C++ code) however at the expense of greatly increased compile times. The speed of compile time is not so relevant to an end user as they don't need to do it very often but for a developer it can have a significant impact on productivity. The PGI compiler has also proven very effective over gcc but I don't have enough first hand experience with it to fairly judge it (I have several nightly builds running with it but I don't use it day-to-day).
As far as open source compilers go, however, I've never been able to build my code bases with Open64 without the compiler crashing. And LLVM/CLang, while very neat and interesting, has yet to impress me with either code speed or compile speed.
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