OpenACC Group Attracts New Members

By DE Editors

The OpenACC standards group has announced that a number of leading research and supercomputing centers have pledged support for its parallel programming standard. Allinea Software, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rogue Wave Software, and the University of Houston have all signed on to the standard.

They join charter members CAPS, Cray, PGI and NVIDIA.

OpenACC is a programming standard for parallel computing using directives, designed to enable millions of scientists around the world to easily take advantage of computing systems equipped with heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems. OpenACC provides a way for scientists,  with or without extensive parallel programming expertise, to accelerate their research in a matter of hours using familiar programming models.

According to the organization, a growing number programmers, scientists and engineers are using OpenACC-supported compilers and software tools to accelerate all types of applications. Those include researchers at Shanghai JiaoTong University, who accelerated DNADist, a widely-used application to study how gene functions vary across populations and species, by 16x by adding only four OpenACC directives to the code; and Aselsan, which accelerated its real-time image preprocessing application, which enables stitching multiple frames to compare images,  by more than 4x by adding only three directives.

OpenACC support for NVIDIA GPUs is now available in production compiler products from Cray, The Portland Group (PGI) and CAPS enterprise.

For more information, visit OpenACC.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.