September 4th, 2014: pocl v0.10 released

Pocl's goal is to become an efficient open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the OpenCL standard (both 1.x and 2.x).

In addition to producing an easily portable open-source OpenCL implementation, another major goal of this project is improving performance portability of OpenCL programs with compiler optimizations, reducing the need for target-dependent manual optimizations.

At the core of pocl is the kernel compiler that consists of a set of LLVM passes used to statically transform kernels into work-group functions with multiple work-items, even in the presence of work-group barriers. These functions are suitable for parallelization in multiple ways (SIMD, VLIW, superscalar,...).

This release adds kernel compiler support for LLVM/Clang 3.5, experimental CMake build scripts, improved thread safety in the host libraries, kernel compiler speedups, plenty of bug fixes, and several new OpenCL API implementations.

We consider pocl ready for wider scale testing, although the OpenCL standard is not yet fully implemented, and it contains known bugs. The pocl test suite compiles and runs most of the ViennaCL 1.5.1 examples, Rodinia 2.0.1 benchmarks, Parboil benchmarks, OpenCL Programming Guide book samples, VexCL test cases, Luxmark v2.0, most of the AMD APP SDK v2.8 OpenCL samples and piglit OpenCL tests among others.

Acknowledgements

We'd like to thank the Radio Implementation Research Team from Nokia Research Center, Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (project "Parallel Acceleration", funding decision 40115/13), Academy of Finland (funding decision 253087) and ARTEMIS joint undertaking under grant agreement no 621439 (ALMARVI) for funding the development of this release.

A pocl developer E. Schnetter acknowledges support from the Perimeter Institute, as well as funding from NSERC (Canada) via a Discovery Grant and from NSF (USA) via OCI Award 0905046.

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