When it comes to high-performance computing applications, OpenMP has long been the standard open-source API for the job. However, OpenCL is now emerging as a new challenger in the HPC space. According to Evans’ Data Corp., OpenCL is now the second most popular HPC tool with almost 28% of developers using OpenCL, ahead of Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (Source: AMD slideset). Evans also shows OpenCL adoption has increased since 2009. AMD has decided to step up its game by releasing optimization and development tools that fill in the gaps it sees in the OpenCL ecosystem.