Oak Ridge Sponsoring GCC Compiler Improvements For NVIDIA + AMD GPU Offloading

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) announced on Thursday that they are funding improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) around GPU compute offloading.

Oak Ridge's OLCF has entered into contract with Siemens' Mentor Graphics to fund more work on GCC upstream development. The work they are funding is on providing better GPU accelerator offloading support for the upstream, open-source GCC compiler. This will include work on both OpenACC and OpenMP.

Not only are both OpenMP and OpenACC being targeted but this is for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors as well. The NVIDIA V100 accelerator support will be focused on given those cards being used within the Summit supercomputer but also for future Exascale computing the work will focus on AMD Radeon Instinct support too given their usage in the future Frontier supercomputer.

Beyond the GPU accelerator work for GCC, Mentor Graphics will also be working on Fortran 2018 standard support in the GCC Fortran front-end compiler.

More details on this agreement between Oak Ridge and Mentor Graphics via ORNL.gov. The statement is quite clear that this agreement is focused on open-source, upstream first principles, which is great to see.