NVIDIA Releases Source To CUDA Compiler 89
An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA has announced they have 'open-sourced' their new CUDA compiler so that their GPGPU platform can be brought to new architectures. NVIDIA's CUDA compiler is based upon LLVM. At the moment though they seem to be restricting the source code's access to 'qualified' individuals.'
The official press release implies wider access to the source will happen later. It so happens that a few days ago AMD opened their OpenCL backend and added initial support to the Free Software r600 driver.
No they haven't (Score:5, Interesting)
Title is correct. From TFA, the summary appears wrong. It seems they are not open sourcing anything. To quote TFA
On December 13th, NVIDIA announced that it will open up the CUDA platform by releasing source code for the CUDA Compiler.
They will let you look at the code, and they might let you send patches back to them. Nowhere I can find did NVIDIA promise anything along the lines of an open license, or even any license at all. This is more like a Microsoft shared-source deal, where you can look, but no rights or privileges are transferred to you.
That said, it would still be cool to see.
Open Source the Libraries (Score:4, Interesting)
The pain is not in compiling GPU code; rather, the pain is in writing good GPU code. The major difference between NVIDIA and AMD (and the major edge NVIDIA has over AMD) is not as much the compiler as it is the libraries.
Of course, I'm biased, because I work at AccelerEyes and we do GPU consulting with our freely available, but not open source, ArrayFire GPU library [accelereyes.com], which has both CUDA and OpenCL versions.
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Re:Still no news about the specific license (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, then how do you explain the rather large numbers of companies that give back to BSD projects? This anti-BSD FUD that the Linux and GPL camp seem to need to spread got old many,many years ago.
Without a permissive license the internet would have been greatly delayed as MS and the others would have had to develop their own TCP/IP stack from scratch.
Re:Should work well with AMD 7000 series (Score:4, Interesting)
D'oh, NM, I RTFA'd:
Nvidia's CUDA compiler will be able to create code that supports more programming languages and will run on AMD and Intel processors, while previously it ran only on Nvidia's GPUs. The company made the announcement today at the GPU Technology Conference in Beijing.
Continuing to call it a CUDA compiler is a bit misleading then isn't it?
From TFA: CUDA runs on x86 (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenCL is a much better path, because it can execute code on a CPU as well as a GPU.
So can CUDA, according to a graphic in one of the featured articles [nvidia.com]: "NVIDIA C or C++, PGI Fortran, or new language support, through LLVM-based CUDA compiler, to NVIDIA GPUs, x86 CPUs, and new processor support."
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