AMD @ SC16: Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) 1.3 Released, Boltzmann Comes to Fruition

CRANK

Kicking off this week is SC, the annual ACM/IEEE sponsored supercomputing conference in the United States. At this show last year, AMD announced the Boltzmann Initiative, their ambitious plan to overhaul their HPC software stack for GPUs. Recognizing that much of NVIDIA’s early and continued success has been due to the quality of the CUDA software ecosystem, AMD set out to create an ecosystem that could rival and even interact with CUDA, in hopes of closing the software gap between the two companies.Now at SC16, the company is both updating participants on the current state of Boltzmann, along with providing the latest software update to the project. Now going under the name the Radeon Open Compute Platform – ROCm – AMD shipped the initial 1.0 version of the platform back in April of this year. That initial release however was, relative to the complete scope of Boltzmann, only the tip of the iceberg. A good deal of what AMD ultimately wanted to do with Boltzmann was not ready (or a…