AMD Announces "Orochi" For HIP/CUDA Run-Time Handling

AMD's GPUOpen team today announced "Orochi" as their latest open-source software offering in the HIP GPU compute space.

While HIP has eased the process for developers to port their traditional NVIDIA CUDA code over to AMD's ROCm stack for GPU execution on Radeon / Instinct hardware, that has resulted in a separate HIP backend from CUDA.

AMD Orochi. This should be great for helping more robust CUDA/HIP support within packaged applications, assuming Orochi's adoption takes off.

AMD Orochi aims to allow NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP support to exist within a single code-base and binaries. Orochi provides a library that loads the HIP and CUDA driver APIs dynamically at run-time. Therefore a single application binary can work on both AMD GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

Orochi is a library that loads HIP and CUDA® driver APIs dynamically at runtime. By switching the CUDA/HIP calls in your app to Orochi calls, you can compile a single executable that will run on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. This streamlines the deployment of your GPU accelerated applications and makes it easy to provide cross-platform support with a single API, thus eliminating the overhead of maintaining separate backends for each platform. We chose the name Orochi as it’s named after the legendary eight-headed Japanese dragon, which goes well with the purpose of our library – to allow a single library with multiple backends at runtime.

AMD announced Orochi today on GPUOpen.com. The code is available via GitHub under an MIT license.