Communications of the ACM
Industry Consortium to Tackle Open Spec for Software Use Across Multicore Devices
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Several companies have formed the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, a consortium to provide an open specification for software to be written and deployed in a cost-effective way across multiple hardware configurations.
HSA will provide an open hardware interface specification under which program execution can be offloaded to other processing resources available in electronic devices. The specification is designed to lead to applications that are portable across architectures, while enabling workloads to be divided up between central processing (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for faster and more power-efficient computing.
HSA also will enhance OpenCL, a programming standard for parallel execution of tasks across multicore processors. "HSA benefits OpenCL by removing memory copies, bringing low-latency dispatch, and helping improve memory model and pointers shared between the CPU and GPU," says AMD's Phil Hughes.
Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron says HSA is an effort to abstract the hardware layer so that software can work across the multiple devices and cores. He says the specification could relieve the worry about software design and potentially help chip makers sell more cores.
From InfoWorld
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