New Open Source Test Suite Adds to Broad Toolset for Heterogeneous System Architecture Development

Beaverton, OR, May 2, 2017 – The HSA Foundation has made available to developers the HSA PRM (Programmer's Reference Manual) conformance test suite as open source software. The test suite is used to validate Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) implementations for both the HSA PRM Specification and HSA PSA (Platform System Architecture) specification.

With this addition to the already available HSA Runtime Conformance tests, HSA developers now have a fully open source conformance test suite for validating all aspects of HSA systems.

HSA is a standardized platform design that unlocks the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in most modern electronic devices. It allows developers to easily and efficiently apply the hardware resources—including CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs, fabrics and fixed function accelerators—in today's complex systems-on-chip (SoCs).

"The HSA Foundation has always been a strong proponent of open source development tools directly and through its member companies," said HSA Foundation Chairman Greg Stoner. "Open sourcing worldwide the PRM conformance test suite is yet another example of an expanding array of development tools freely available supporting HSA."

According to HSA Foundation President Dr. John Glossner, "The decision to open source the conformance test suite is strongly supported by the HSA Foundation and we believe this is an important step for allowing the developer community including non-member China Regional Committee (CRC) participants to test HSA systems. With the ability to develop conformance tests, the community can now contribute to the new test and thus drive the continual improvement of the test quality and consistency."

"Good quality open source components are crucial in making heterogeneous computing more accessible to programmers and standards adopters. It is great to see that HSA Foundation continues its open source strategy by releasing the important PRM conformance test suite to the public," said Dr. Pekka Jääskeläinen, CEO of Parmance.

The HSA Foundation through its member companies and universities has also released many additional projects which are all available on the Foundation's GitHub site including:

HSAIL Developer Tools: finalizer, debugger, assembler, and simulator
GCC HSAIL frontend developed by Parmance and General Processor Technologies (GPT) allowing gcc finalization for any gcc machine target; the frontend is included in the upcoming GCC 7 release
Heterogeneous compute compiler (hcc) for single-source compilation of heterogeneous systems
Runtime implementations including AMD's ROCm and phsa-runtime by Parmance and GPT; phsa-runtime can be used together with GCC HSAIL frontend to support the entire HSA programming stack using open source components
Portable Computing Language (pocl), an open source implementation of the OpenCL standard with a backend for HSA developed by the Customized Parallel Computing group of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) –an HSA Foundation Academic Center of Excellence

See the complete roster at: https://github.com/HSAFoundation.

About the HSA Foundation

The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a non-profit consortium of SoC IP vendors, OEMs, Academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs, whose goal is making programming for parallel computing easy and pervasive. HSA members are building a heterogeneous computing ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, which combines scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU, while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance with low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation using CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, while supporting a diverse set of high-level programming languages, and creating the foundation for next-generation, general-purpose computing.

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