Comparative analysis of openACC compilers

Abstract

OpenACC has been on development for a few years now. The OpenACC 2.5 specification was recently made public and there are some initiatives for developing full implementations of the standard to make use of accelerator capabilities. There is much to be done yet, but currently, OpenACC for GPUs is reaching a good maturity level in various implementations of the standard, using CUDA and OpenCL as backends. Nvidia is investing in this project and they have released an OpenACC Toolkit, including the PGI Compiler. There are, however, more developments out there. In this work, we analyze different available OpenACC compilers that have been developed by companies or universities during the last years. We check their performance and maturity, keeping in mind that OpenACC is designed to be used without extensive knowledge about parallel programming. Our results show that the compilers are on their way to a reasonable maturity, presenting different strengths and weaknesses.