HSA Foundation releases Version 0.95 of its Programmers Reference Manual

Parallel computing technology promoting industry consortium HSA Foundation has released Version 0.95 of its Programmer¹s Reference Manual. Programmer¹s Reference Manual enables software partners to develop libraries, tools and middleware and to code high performance kernels. The Programmer¹s Reference Manual provides standard method to utilize wide range of computing resources in handling parallelizable tasks in HSA-compliant systems. Low energy consumption is also key aspect of this effort. HSA release states "The programming architecture detailed in the HSA Programmer¹s Reference Manual calls out features specifically exposed to programmers of the HSA architecture. HSA devices will typically include a broad class of devices, including GPUs and DSPs and support a number of key hardware features that enable easier developer programmability. These include shared coherent virtual memory, platform atomics, user mode queuing and GPU self-queuing." These features, in conjunction with the correct software stack make programming all devices in an HSA architecture as easy as programming a CPU, and because of this, closer interlinking of processing on all devices is made possible, says HSA. HSA abstracts away the native instruction set of the parallel processor through the HSA Intermediate Language (HSAIL). This language has been designed for parallel processing and can be tra...