AMD Releases AOMP 15.0-0 For Radeon OpenMP Compiler, Prepares New "AFAR" Compiler

AMD engineers on the ROCm team have released AOMP 15.0-0 on Monday as the newest version of their Radeon OpenMP compiler code. It also turns out they are working on another Radeon GPU compute compiler called "AFAR".

While more Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading patches have been working their way into upstream LLVM, AOMP contains the latest open-source staging code around their compiler code focused on GPU offloading to AMD Radeon graphics hardware. This is a constantly-changing code-base and hence AOMP 15.0-0 as their first version now re-based against the upstream LLVM 15.0 Git development code-base following LLVM's recent 14 upstream release.

Besides using LLVM 15.0 Git sources as of late March, AOMP 15.0-0 is using ROCm 5.0 sources as well for its related Radeon components.

When it comes to AMD's changes in this release, AOMP 15.0-0 includes build changes around its necessary dependencies, enhanced support for compute unit masking to better support multiple devices, reliability improvements, performance optimizations, and more.

The release notes also mention they are working on yet another software project in this same scope, AFAR. The release notes for AOMP 15.0-0 mention:

"The AOMP release is done in concert with a ROCm AFAR compiler release. The primary difference is that the AFAR compiler depends and works with an installed version of ROCm and installed as a tarball. AOMP is a standalone build and only depends on the amdgpu Linux kernel module and is installed with debian or rpm packages. The AFAR compiler for this release can be found at this URL XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

This is my first time hearing of the AMD ROCm AFAR compiler. As of writing I haven't been able to find this AFAR compiler within any other AMD/ROCm GitHub repositories and the like. With AFAR working with ROCm installed separately, it sounds like it will be more robust though in some regards AOMP is easier to get setup and going. We'll see what other differences this AFAR compiler may have with being yet another AMD compiler effort. If it's just about installation strategy, it seems it would have been easier just naming AOMP and "AOMP Standalone" or so than having yet another new name in the increasingly large ROCm software space, so we'll see what other changes AFAR may usher in.

More details on AOMP 15.0-0 via GitHub while I'll be on the look out for the new AFAR compiler code release.