Portable Computing Language For Linux

Portable Computing Language (also known as pocl) is an open source and free command-line software implemented in C/C++ and designed from the ground up to act as an efficient implementation of the OpenCL standard.

Being comprised of a set of LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) passes, the pocl project aims to improve the portability of OpenCL applications with various compiler optimizations. It supports ICD (Installable Client Driver) and comes with a portable kernel compiler.

The portable kernel compiler includes an experimental, yet attractive functionality: horizontal auto-vectorization of workgroups. The software offers efficient, built-in math libraries, and core APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) written in C and designed for barebone PCs.

Currently, Portable Computing Language is compatible with a wide variety of OpenCL applications, including ViennaCL 1.5.1 examples, most of the Parboil benchmarks, Rodinia 2.0.1, piglit, Luxmark 2.0, as well as the OpenCL Programming Guide book samples and AMD APP SDK v2.8 OpenCL samples.

As its name suggests, Portable Computing Language is a portable application, which means that it has been successfully tested on a wide range of hardware platforms, with both hosts and devices, including x86_64 (64-bit), PowerPC64, PowerPC32, ARM v7, and multiple VLIW-style TTA CPUs that have been designed using TCE in heterogeneous host-device setups.

Installing Portable Computing Language on your GNU/Linux operating system is quite easy, considering the fact that you already have the hwloc, ocl-icd, opencl, clang and llvm packages installed on your distribution.

Download the latest version of the program from Softpedia or via its official website (see link at the end of the article), save the archive somewhere on your PC, extract its contents using an archive manager utility and open a terminal emulator application.

In the Terminal app, go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/pocl-0.10), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.