Cray has announced that they have officially acquired the PathScale Compiler Suite from the recently defunct assets of SiCortex. Cray plans on leveraging pieces of the PathScale IP in order to enhance their own compiler offerings over time. Other parts of the suite will be contributed to the open source via an alliance with NetSyncro.com. NetSyncro is an organization of compiler engineers with good ties to the open source community. NetSyncro will continue developing the PathScale Compiler Suite, provide support for their current users and will rebrand the effort under the original PathScale name.
Our main goal for this acquisition was to provide clear direction for those Cray customers who want to continue using the PathScale Compiler Suite on Cray supercomputers,” said Peter Ungaro, Cray president and CEO. “We believe turning the PathScale compiler’s future development and customer support over to a new and similar PathScale organization accomplishes our goal, as it provides a path forward for PathScale compiler users and helps ensure that the software will have a robust, open source HPC community around it. We also expect our own world-class compiler to benefit from some of the PathScale technology. This is another indicative example of our strategy to acquire the key technology components necessary to building a productive, high performance user environment on our supercomputers.”
I cannot express enough gratitude to Cray in helping rebuild PathScale and giving us this opportunity for the future,” said Christopher Bergström, PathScale’s new CTO. “Our vision ahead is bright and optimistic with a focus to continue our position as one of the highest performing HPC compilers in the industry. As a new member of the PathScale team I intend to lead the way in building a strong open source community for PathScale. We believe our solid commitment to open source will enable the community to thrive by facilitating collaboration, sharing of knowledge, innovation and research.”
For those unfamiliar with PathScale, it started life as the Silicon Graphics MIPSPro compiler. When Silicon Graphics decided to divest themselves of the compiler business, they sent the MIPSPro compiler to the open source. It took on the new name of Open64. PathScale adapted much of the lower end semantics from Open64 [with their obvious secret sauce on top]. For more info, read the full release here.