Re: GCC & OpenCL ?

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

Michael Meissner wrote:
> I am just starting to think about adding OpenCL support into future
> versions of GCC, as it looks like a useful way of programming highly
> parallel type systems, particularly with hetrogeneous processors.  At
> this point, I am wondering what kind of interest people have in
> working together on OpenCL in the GCC compiler?

I'm personally less interested in OpenCL (maybe because I don't know it yet
so well - I just have head of it). However, I wonder whether one can
create some infrastructure in GCC which can also be used by other parts.

Or at least I assume one needs to have some library which somehow provides
the communication and common routines for that. And at least for non-shared
memory this library support could be of interest for Fortran 2008's coarrays
and for UPC.  (I don't know what the plans for UPC support in GCC; there
exists patches on top of GCC 4.2 but seemingly there is no plan of merging it.
I also don't know how big the demand is. For Fortran, I think there is
some demand already since Cray and g95 support it - and there is the
intention to implement it in gfortran and ifort.)

(It would also be cool if one could get Fortran work in heterogenous
environements such as GPUs, but I don't see how Fortran/coarrays fit
into the OpenCL ideas.)

Tobias