HIP Release 0.86 Now Available

The team just released an update to HIP in version 0.86 which includes several improvements in the functionality and tools. Also we have included several additional HIP ports and examples.

If you’re just getting started, HIP (or Heterogeneous-Computing Interface for Portability) is a portable C++ runtime and kernel language for GPUs, and includes tools to “hipify” CUDA code into the portable C++ language.

HIP 0.86 Release Notes

Release:0.86.00
Date: 2016.06.06

• Add clang-hipify : clang-based hipify tool.  Improved parsing of source code, and automates
  creation of hipLaunchParm variable.
• Implement memory register / unregister commands (hipHostRegister, hipHostUnregister)
• Add cross-linking support between G++ and HCC, in particular for interfaces that use
  standard C++ libraries (ie std::vectors, std::strings).  HIPCC now uses libstdc++ by default on the HCC
  compilation path.
• More samples including gpu-burn, SHOC, nbody, rtm.  See HIP-Examples.

Also some info on the previous 0.84 release:

Release:0.84.01
Date: 2016.04.25

– Refactor HIP make and install system:
– Move to CMake. Refer to the installation section in README.md for details.
– Split source into multiple modular .cpp and .h files.
– Create static library and link.
– Set HIP_PATH to install.
– Make hipDevice and hipStream thread-safe.
– Prefered hipStream usage is still to create new streams for each new thread, but it works even if you don;t.
– Improve automated platform detection: If AMD GPU is installed and detected by driver, default HIP_PLATFORM to hcc.
– HIP_TRACE_API now prints arguments to the HIP function (in addition to name of function).
– Deprecate hipDeviceGetProp (Replace with hipGetDeviceProp)
– Deprecate hipMallocHost (Replace with hipHostMalloc)
– Deprecate hipFreeHost (Replace with hipHostFree)
– The mixbench benchmark tool for measuring operational intensity now has a HIP target, in addition to CUDA and OpenCL.  Let the comparisons begin. 🙂

See mixbench GitHub site for more.

Related Resources

• Technical Blogs
• HIP GitHub Repository