HSA Foundation releases version 0.95 of the ‘Programmers Reference Manual’ (HSAIL Spec).

[Frost, Gary]

Yesterday the HSA Foundation released their ‘Programmers Reference Manual’. This manual is  for developers wishing to write code for upcoming HSA compatible devices,  it describes the HSA Intermediate Language (HSAIL) along with its binary form (BRIG) and describes how code is expected to execute on a HSA enabled devices.

In many ways we can think of HSAIL as we do Java bytecode.  It is a common intermediate form that can be optimized at runtime to execute across a variety of future heterogeneous platforms. HSAIL will  greatly simplify the development of software taking advantage of both sequential and parallel compute solutions.

I predict that this will prove to be a big deal for both Graal and Sumatra.

Sumatra developers working inside AMD already have a prototype that can intercept the dispatch of specific Lambda/Stream API’s, generate HSAIL(via an HSAIL-enabled GRAAL backend) and execute this code.   We have executed code for several applications and test cases on simulators as well as on early access HSA compatible hardware.

We have been waiting for the HSAIL spec to be released.  Now that the spec is out, we will make contributions to both the GRAAL and Sumatra mercurial repositories within the next 2 weeks.

Gary

Links:
     HSA announcement

http://hsafoundation.com/hsa-foundation-has-just-released-version-0-95-of-the-programmers-reference-manual-which-we-affectionately-refer-to-as-the-hsail-spec/



    Spec/manual

https://hsafoundation.box.com/s/m6mrsjv8b7r50kqeyyal