Samsung Brings OpenACC 1.0+ Support To GCC Fortran

Samsung is still working towards bringing OpenACC support to GCC. We've seen Samsung developers working on OpenACC for GCC over the past several months -- along with other OpenACC initiatives out of CodeSourcery, etc -- and now there's some new OpenACC GCC Fortran patches.

Published this week by Ilmir Usmanov at Samsung is OpenACC 1.0+ support for the Fortran front-end that the developer is now pursuing be pushed into the GOMP4 compiler branch. The patches provide near complete support for OpenACC 1.0 plus some elements of OpenACC 2.0.

Those Fortran developers interested in OpenACC support can try out and test these patches that will hopefully be merged into the mainline GOMP4 branch soon.

In related news, Thomas Schwinge at CodeSourcery is taking over the GOMP4 branch as its current maintainer, Jakub Jelinek at Red Hat, is busy preparing the GCC 4.9 compiler release. The GOMP4 branch contains much of GCC's OpenMP 4.0 and OpenACC support work from various organizations.

For those unfamiliar with OpenACC, it's a programming standard backed by NVIDIA, Cray, and other organizations for heterogeneous CPU/GPU programming in C/C++ and Fortran. OpenACC is quite similar to OpenMP with its pragmas but the advantage of OpenACC is its GPU focus. OpenACC support is still coming about in GCC with numerous implementations having been published from converting OpenACC down to either OpenMP or OpenCL code, etc. CodeSourcery has been aiming for OpenACC 2.0 with NVIDIA GPU support as part of a deal with the graphics card maker.