What is ROCm?#
2024-01-16
8 min read time
ROCm is an open-source stack, composed primarily of open-source software, designed for graphics processing unit (GPU) computation. ROCm consists of a collection of drivers, development tools, and APIs that enable GPU programming from low-level kernel to end-user applications.
With ROCm, you can customize your GPU software to meet your specific needs. You can develop, collaborate, test, and deploy your applications in a free, open source, integrated, and secure software ecosystem. ROCm is particularly well-suited to GPU-accelerated high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), scientific computing, and computer aided design (CAD).
ROCm is powered by AMD’s Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability (HIP), an open-source software C++ GPU programming environment and its corresponding runtime. HIP allows ROCm developers to create portable applications on different platforms by deploying code on a range of platforms, from dedicated gaming GPUs to exascale HPC clusters.
ROCm supports programming models, such as OpenMP and OpenCL, and includes all necessary open source software compilers, debuggers, and libraries. ROCm is fully integrated into machine learning (ML) frameworks, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
ROCm projects#
ROCm consists of the following drivers, development tools, and APIs.
Project |
Description |
|---|---|
Contains source code for AMD’s compute languages runtimes: HIP and OpenCL |
|
A scripted build of LLVM and supporting software |
|
A runtime framework for efficient task management in heterogeneous CPU-GPU systems |
|
A library that aims to provide a programming model for writing performance critical kernels for machine learning workloads across multiple architectures |
|
An out-of-tree Fortran compiler targeting LLVM |
|
A C++ header-only library that provides an IEEE 754 conformant, 16-bit half-precision floating-point type along with corresponding arithmetic operators, type conversions, and common mathematical functions |
|
AMD’s GPU programming language extension and the GPU runtime |
|
A BLAS-marshaling library that supports rocBLAS and cuBLAS backends |
|
A compiler driver utility that calls Clang or NVCC and passes the appropriate include and library options for the target compiler and HIP infrastructure |
|
A thin header-only wrapper library on top of rocPRIM or CUB that allows project porting using the CUB library to the HIP layer |
|
A fast Fourier transforms (FFT)-marshalling library that supports rocFFT or cuFFT backends |
|
A Fortran interface library for accessing GPU Kernels |
|
A set of tools for translating CUDA source code into portable HIP C++ |
|
A Clang-based tool for translating CUDA sources into HIP sources |
|
An autogenerated, perl-based script that translates CUDA source code into portable HIP C++ |
|
An LAPACK-marshalling library that supports rocSOLVER and cuSOLVER backends |
|
A SPARSE-marshalling library that supports rocSPARSE and cuSPARSE backends |
|
AMD’s C++ library for accelerating tensor primitives based on the composable kernel library |
|
A toolkit for the construction of highly optimized compilers, optimizers, and run-time environments |
|
A graph inference engine that accelerates machine learning model inference |
|
An open source deep-learning library |
|
An OpenCL general matrix multiplication (GEMM) API and kernel generator |
|
Provides host-callable interfaces to Tensile library |
|
A set of comprehensive computer vision and machine learning libraries, utilities, and applications |
|
A performance analysis tool that gathers data from the API run-time and GPU for OpenCL and ROCm/HSA applications |
|
A standalone library that provides multi-GPU and multi-node collective communication primitives |
|
An augmentation library designed to decode and process images and videos |
|
A sparse linear algebra library for exploring fine-grained parallelism on ROCm runtime and toolchains |
|
Captures the performance characteristics of buffer copying and kernel read/write operations |
|
A BLAS implementation (in the HIP programming language) on the ROCm runtime and toolchains |
|
A software library for computing fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) written in HIP |
|
An AMDGPU Driver with KFD that is used by ROCm |
|
A Clang/LLVM-based compiler |
|
A collection of CMake modules for common build and development tasks |
|
Simplifies administration and addresses key infrastructure challenges in AMD GPUs in cluster and data-center environments |
|
A library that can print the state of all AMD GPU wavefronts that caused a queue error by sending a SIGQUIT signal to the process while the program is running |
|
A source-level debugger for Linux, based on the GNU Debugger (GDB) |
|
The ROCm debugger API library |
|
Reports system information |
|
A C library for Linux that provides a user space interface for applications to monitor and control GPU applications |
|
A tool for detecting and troubleshooting common problems affecting AMD GPUs running in a high-performance computing environment |
|
A header-only library for HIP parallel primitives |
|
A profiling tool for HIP applications |
|
Provides functions that generate pseudorandom and quasirandom numbers |
|
User-mode API interfaces and libraries necessary for host applications to launch compute kernels on available HSA ROCm kernel agents |
|
An implementation of LAPACK routines on ROCm software, implemented in the HIP programming language and optimized for AMD’s latest discrete GPUs |
|
Exposes a common interface that provides BLAS for sparse computation implemented on ROCm runtime and toolchains (in the HIP programming language) |
|
A parallel algorithm library |
|
User-mode API interfaces used to interact with the ROCk driver |
|
Intercepts runtime API calls and traces asynchronous activity |
|
A C++ library for accelerating mixed-precision matrix multiply-accumulate (MMA) operations |
|
A tool for creating benchmark-driven backend libraries for GEMMs, GEMM-like problems, and general N-dimensional tensor contractions |
|
A utility to benchmark simultaneous transfers between user-specified devices (CPUs/GPUs) |