[gmx-developers] GROMACS OpenCL on Gallium

[Vedran Miletić]

2015-11-26 19:37 GMT+01:00 Roland Schulz <roland at utk.edu>:
> Hi,
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if OpenCL is fading out. NVidia and Intel have very
> little to no interest. And AMD has realized that a standard only really
> supported by them isn't going to be used and they now push HIP
> (http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/boltzmann-initiative-2015nov16.aspx)
> instead. People from AMD I talked to at SC, recommended to use HIP over
> OpenCL because they claim this will allow performance portable code. This
> might leave the FPGA guys as the only ones providing performant OpenCL
> implementations. Of course having a true standard would be nicer than having
> to rely on HIP/Cuda but in practice it might very well be that those are the
> only useful (=performant) options in the future.
>
> Roland
>

They promise an open source compiler in the link you provided. If they
provide sufficent code to make this work with Mesa/Gallium3D driver,
it might be interesting to look into making GROMACS utilize HIP.

I personally don't care about support for it if it works only on AMD's
proprietary driver. We already have decent proprietary stack (and
better hardware in terms of performance per watt) on NVIDIA's side.

Regards,
Vedran Miletic

-- 
Vedran Miletić
http://vedranmileti.ch/