Sourcery VSIPL++ 1.3

Performance Improvements on Mercury Systems

Sourcery VSIPL++ now makes more efficient use of the Mercury Scientific Algorithm Library (SAL) and Parallel Accelleration System (PAS) APIs. These changes result in significant improvements in performance on Mercury systems.

VSIPL API Back End

Sourcery VSIPL++ can now leverage the VSIPL API for computation. (VSIPL is a C API that provides a subset of the functionality available in Sourcery VSIPL++.) If appropriately configured, Sourcery VSIPL++ will use the VSIPL API for a variety of computations, including matrix-vector products, FFTs, and solvers.

On many systems, better performance can be obtained with other math libraries, such as Mercury's Scientific Algorithm Library (SAL) or the Intel Performance Primitives (IPP). However, support for the VSIPL API makes it possible to use the Sourcery VSIPL++ API on a wider variety of systems. And, on systems where a highly optimized VISPL library is available, the VSIPL API provides a good mechanism for delivering high performance in Sourcery VSIPL++.

Core VSIPL++ API

By default, Sourcery VSIPL++ implements a superset of the standard VISPL++ API. It is now possible to disable most of these additional features. In this scaled-down mode, Sourcery VSIPL++ performance is substantially reduced. However, this mode is useful for confirming that an application uses only the standard API features. The core portions of Sourcery VSIPL++ are now available under a BSD-style license.