The Embedded Vision Alliance has published an in-depth overview of OpenCL, jointly published by some Khronos Group members. Please note that a free registration is required to view the entire article.

This >a href=“http://www.iwocl.org/conf-2015/the-future-of-heterogeneous-compute-apis-a-developer-feedback-session-on-khronos-opencl-sycl-and-spir-v/”>special FREE to attend IWOCL 2015 session will kick-off with a technical presentation of the new features of OpenCL 2.1 followed by a developer feedback session covering OpenCL 2.1, SYCL and SPIR-V. This session provides developers with an opportunity help drive future development of the OpenCL related APIs. During the session you will have the opportunity to provide your feedback to key members of the Khronos specification working groups, fellow developers and a select group of OpenCL vendors.

Khronos Group member Movidius continues to scale its R&D team, appointed new members to its Technical Advisory Board, collaborated with new customers and partners, such as Google for its Project Tango device, and launched the next generation of its vision processor for mobile and connected devices. Movidius is one of many Khronos Group members working on the OpenVX API.

The 3D Web Fest is coming to San Francisco on May 13th, bringing together designers, artists, developers and technologists to celebrate the best of the 3D web. The lineup of artists and producers will feature work from leading creative coders in the field including Isaac Cohen, Mate Steinforth, Weidong Yang, and many others, which will be shown during live screening presentations. The 3D Web Fest’s web-based project showcase offers up a compelling blend of art and technology, exhibiting what’s possible with the advent of 3D Web in a film festival format and club atmosphere. Tickets are now available.

AJ Guillon will be presenting the upcoming Fields Institute Working Lunch Seminar on OpenCL this April 28th 2015. This talk will motivate the OpenCL standard and present its opportunities and challenges. A survey of performance gains and energy savings will be provided so that the potential of the parallel heterogeneous compute era can be understood. The recent announcements from Khronos at GDC 2015, including Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1, will be echoed. AJ Guillon is a Khronos member and actively contributed to the new OpenCL C++ kernel language, provisionally released as part of OpenCL 2.1. In order to attend, you must register by April 26th.

The organisers of IWOCL, the International Workshop on OpenCL, announced that AMD and HP have sponsored the Advanced Hands-On OpenCL Tutorial that will kick-off IWOCL 2015. The tutorial, which will focus on advanced OpenCL concepts, is an extension of the highly successful ‘Hands on OpenCL’ course which has received over 3,000 downloads. Simon McIntosh-Smith, Senior Lecturer in High Performance Computing and Architectures at the University of Bristol and one of the authors of the original open-source course will lead the tutorial. The full-day Advanced Hands-On OpenCL tutorial takes place on Monday 11th May at the Li Ka Shing Center, Stanford University. Registration is $145. For additional information visit the official website.

Red Hat’s Christian Schaller posted a blog entry announcing their Khronos Membership. “The reason we are joining is because of all the important changes that are happening in Graphics and GPU compute these days and our wish to have more direct input of the direction of some of these technologies” wrote Christian.

Dr Tomasz Bednarz currently works as a Principal Research Fellow at the QUT Science and Engineering Faculty, and finds time to run the Brisbane GPU Meet-up group and the Khronos Brisbane Chapter. Tomasz will be giving a workshop on High-performance Visualisation Using OpenGL/WebGL. This workshop will provide introduction to OpenGL and will include introductions and hands-on exercises to basic concepts of hardware rendered graphics, shader language and WebGL. Short introductions to OpenCL and new Vulkan APIs will be also showcased.

NVIDIA has released driver 350.12, which is both a Game Ready release and their first R349 WHQL release. NVIDIA has also posted a bit more information (PDF) on their OpenCL 1.2 driver. The OpenCL 1.2 drivers are based on the published Khronos Specification and are expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing. OpenCL 1.2 functionality will be available on Kepler and Maxwell GPUs.

The CAD Society has awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jon Peddie of JPR and GraphicSpeak based on his research and publications around 3D graphics technology. The award is given “in recognition of his outstanding lifelong pioneering, consulting, and analysis service dedicated to advancing the underappreciated pixel.” Jon Peddie has been a long time friend and partner of The Khronos Group, and we’d like to congratulate him on this great achievement.

Samsung R&D Institute UK invites you to the next meeting of the Khronos UK Chapter on Tuesday 14th April , taking place during the LLVM conference in the New Academic Building at Goldsmiths, University of London. The meeting will focus on how SPIR-V is a cornerstone of the new Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1 APIs recently announced by Khronos, how SPIR-V evolved from LLVM IR and why a binary intermediate language is important to the industry. Meeting starts at 1PM.

Hear Khronos members at FMX 2015 on May 5th, talk about the upcoming Vulkan API, SPIR-V as well as recent progress in OpenCL and WebGL. Speakers will be Jan Hermes, Senior Software Engineer, Continental Automotive GmbH and Bastian Sdorra, Graphics Researcher, Dassault Systemes 3DEXCITE GmbH.

The Khronos Group has released revision 30 of the SPIR-V specification. This revision of SPIR-V includes multiple corrections and synchronizes all token spellings to the official headers. These official C/C++ headers are available along with the specification in the registry.

The AMD exhibit showcases offer attendees a range of hands-on workflow experiences powered by AMD FirePro professional graphics: New fully integrated and redesigned OpenCL AMD accelerated features for Adobe Premiere Pro CC allow editors to be more creative with color than before. In addition to OpenCL streamlined color features, Adobe will showcase an all new OpenCL powered Morph Cut feature for making jump cuts natural and seamless; Autodesk demonstration featuring the FireRender plug-in for 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya with OpenCL accelerated Bullet Physics and deformers powered by a workstation with AMD FirePro W9100 professional graphics.

Samsung R&D Institute UK invites you to the next meeting of the Khronos UK Chapter on Tuesday 14th April, taking place during the LLVM conference in the New Academic Building at Goldsmiths, University of London. The meeting will focus on how SPIR-V is a cornerstone of the new Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1 APIs recently announced by Khronos, how SPIR-V evolved from LLVM IR and why a binary intermediate language is important to the industry.