One of the reasons CUDA won over OpenCL, was that NVidia, contrary to Khronos, saw a value in helping those HPC researchers move their Fortran code into the GPU.

Hence they bought PGI, and improved their compiler.

Intel eventually did the same with Open API (which isn't plain OpenCL, rather an extension with Intel goodies).

I was on a Khronos webminar where the panel showed disbelief why anyone would care about Fortran, oh well.

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kristianp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's insane how big the NVidia dev kit is. They've got a library for everything. It seems like they have as broad software support as possible.

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bee_rider 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s actually pretty surprising to me. Of course, there are always jokes about Fortran being some language that people don’t realize is still kicking. But I’d expect a standards group that is at least parallel computing adjacent to know that it is still around.

	▲	pjmlp a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yet not only they joked about Fortran, it took CUDA adoption success, for them to take C++ seriously and come up with SPIR as counterpoint to PTX. Which in the end was worthless because both Intel and AMD botched all OpenCL 2.x efforts. Hence why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.0 rebranded, and SYSCL went its own way. It took a commercial company, Codeaplay a former compiler vendor for games consoles, to actually come up with a good tooling for SYSCL. Which Intel in the middle of extending SYSCL with their Data Paralell C++, eventually acquired. Those products are in the foundation of One API, and naturally go beyond what barebones OpenCL happens to be. The mismanagement Khronos has done with OpenCL is one of the reasons Apple lost ties with Khronos.