OpenACC

OpenACC (for open accelerators) is a programming standard for parallel computing developed by Cray, CAPS, Nvidia and PGI. The standard is designed to simplify parallel programming of heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems.

Like in OpenMP, the programmer can annotate C, C++ and Fortran source code to identify the areas that should be accelerated using compiler directives and additional functions. Like OpenMP 4.0 and newer, code can be started on both the CPU and GPU.

OpenACC members have worked as members of the OpenMP standard group to merge into OpenMP specification to create a common specification which extends OpenMP to support accelerators in a future release of OpenMP. These efforts resulted in a technical report for comment and discussion timed to include the annual Supercomputing Conference (November 2012, Salt Lake City) and to address non-Nvidia accelerator support with input from hardware vendors who participate in OpenMP.

At ISC’12 OpenACC was demonstrated to work on Nvidia, AMD and Intel accelerators, without performance data.

In November 12, 2012, at the SC12 conference, a draft of the OpenACC version 2.0 specification was presented. New suggested capabilities include new controls over data movement (such as better handling of unstructured data and improvements in support for non-contiguous memory), and support for explicit function calls and separate compilation (allowing the creation and reuse of libraries of accelerated code). OpenACC 2.0 was officially released in June 2013.