SCIENCE

CAPS is announcing today new 2.4 release of its HMPP hybrid compiler, easier to use and supporting a much wider range of OS and compilers for Linux but also Windows.  

Based on GPU programming and tuning directives, HMPP offers an incremental programming model that allows developers with different levels of expertise to fully exploit GPU hardware accelerators in their legacy code. 

With the last generation of GPU, performance gain can be improved by executing several kernels on a same GPU. In its latest 2.4 version, HMPP includes this feature at source code level providing a support to allocate different groups or codelets on a same device, which generates new opportunities with the latest hardware architectures.

This new release also brings even more ease of use for the developer. Before 2.4 release, HMPP programmers needed to explicitly declare the input/output status of each variable used in a HMPP region. HMPP 2.4 adds region programming simplification by providing an automatic detection of these data intents (in and inout).

HMPP 2.4 also eases the programmer’s work concerning CPU-GPU data coherence management by providing an automatic data transfer mode. This mode handles the needs of codelet argument transfer according to the computations done on the CPU or on the GPU.

HMPP 2.4 is the first version which officially brings a support for hybrid computation on Microsoft Windows system. Through the use of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE, HMPP is now available on Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 and Windows 7. CAPS is thus extending HMPP capabilities to a much broader audience of technical computing users. 

Moreover, Eclipse being a widely-used, open-source, integrated development environment (IDE) which provides a highly integrated environment designed for the development of parallel applications, CAPS decided to provide in HMPP 2.4 an Eclipse plugin providing miscellaneous views and online documentation easing the HMPP programmer’s work.

« With a rich set of GPU-programming directives, HMPP already enabled developers to fully exploit GPU capabilities. These new features make HMPP programming even simpler with still a very high level of achievable performance. Also, by releasing HMPP for Microsoft Visual Studio, by providing an Eclipse plugin and by enabling the use of profilers and debuggers, this new version really opens HMPP to a broader community of developers. », comments Eric Courtois, Software Development Manager at CAPS.

With 2.4 version, HMPP Ecosystem is more than ever in evolution. CAPS enriches its programming workbench with tuning and debugging capabilities and goes toward integrated cores technologies: use of profiling and debugging tools such as Vampir or Allinea DDT, integration of Absoft Pro Fortran compiler to the list of already supported compilers… and of course the support of the latest constructor’s SDK providing by NVIDIA and AMD/ATI.

CAPS will be demonstrating HMPP 2.4 at SC10 in New Orleans until November 18th. Free trial versions are also available on request from the website www.caps-entreprise.com.