News

The Institute for Development and Resources in Intensive Scientific Computing (IDRIS) , the national centre of the CNRS that hosts more than 1400 projects in both HPC and AI domains, held their fourth consecutive Open Hackathon in a hybrid format to help applications to run at scale on the Jean Zay supercomputing system. The hybrid event saw eight teams with projects ranging from bioinformatics to large language model (LLM) training benefit from dedicated mentor collaboration and community knowledge exchange. 

As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch.

AMD’s near-ancient 3DNow! instructions have faded even further into obscurity. Open-source compiler LLVM is finally removing support for the set of instructions that hasn’t been supported by AMD’s CPUs since 2011.

The 3DNow! instruction set was introduced in 1998 as a competitor to Intel’s MMX. It added Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions to AMD’s base x86 instruction set, which helped the CPUs do vector processing of floating-point operations using vector registers.

There was a very exciting Friday evening code drop out of AMD... They announced a new project called Peano that serves as an open-source LLVM compiler back-end for AMD/Xilinx AI engine processors with a particular focus on the Ryzen AI SOCs with existing Phoenix and Hawk Point hardware as well as the upcoming XDNA2 found with the forthcoming Ryzen AI 300 series.