The Khronos Group has issued a Request for Proposals for SYCL 2020 CTS. This project will improve the existing SYCL Conformance Test Suite (CTS) targeting the SYCL 2020 standard specification[1] in two ways:

• improved test coverage of SYCL 2020 tests;

• CTS Framework refactoring to reduce development barriers to creating and deploying new tests.

The work described in this RFP covers 6 months of work aiming for breadth-first coverage, with the possibility of extension at the WG’s discretion for further depth coverage

RFP responses are requested by 5p.m. PT on Monday July 25, 2022.

In this article, James Brodman and John Pennycook review five outstanding additions found in SYCL 2020. A key goal of SYCL 2020 is to align SYCL with ISO C++, which has two benefits. First, it ensures that SYCL feels natural to C++ programmers. Second, it allows SYCL to act as a proving ground for multivendor, multiarchitecture solutions to heterogeneous programming that may inform other C++ libraries (and perhaps ISO C++ itself).

Many of the syntactic changes in SYCL 2020 are a result of updating the base language from C++11 to C++17, enabling developers to take advantage of features such as class template argument deduction (CTAD) and deduction guides. But there are many new features, too! In this article, we choose to highlight five features new in SYCL 2020 and talk a little about why they matter.

• Backends open the door for SYCL implementations built on other languages/frameworks besides OpenCL, enabling SYCL to target a wider variety of hardware.

• Unified shared memory (USM) is a pointer-based access model, which serves as an alternative to the buffer/accessor model from SYCL 1.2.1.

• Reductions are a common programming pattern, which SYCL 2020 accelerates via a “built-in” library.

• The group library provides abstractions for cooperative work items, yielding additional application performance and programmer productivity through alignment with underlying hardware capabilities (regardless of vendor).

• Atomic references aligned with the C++20 std::atomic_ref extend the C++ memory model to heterogeneous devices.

Leading standards organizations and companies have united to drive open metaverse interoperability needed to build the open metaverse. The Metaverse Standards Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated. Open to all at no cost, the Forum will focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.

The following graphic cards from the Intel® Arc™ line are now fully conformant: A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and A770M.

Use Rive’s familiar design and animation tools with our ground-breaking State Machine to create interactive content for your products, apps, sites, and games. No code or full code, you choose. Easily embed interactive animations or manipulate everything with code — Rive empowers you to work the way you want.

In this new blog post by Collabora, Manas Chaudhary guides us through the process of adding secondary command buffers to PanVK, the open source Vulkan driver.

PoCL is a portable open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the OpenCL standard. It likely supports the minimal v3.0 feature set (official conformance stamp not yet applied for). In addition to being an easily portable multi-device (truly heterogeneous) open-source OpenCL implementation, a major goal of this project is improving interoperability for diversity of OpenCL-capable devices by integrating them to a single centrally orchestrated platform. Another key goal is to enhance performance portability of OpenCL programs across device types utilizing runtime and compiler techniques.

Upstream PoCL currently supports various CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs via libcuda and ASIPs (experimental, see: http://openasip.org). It is also known to have multiple (private) adaptations in active production use.

Nreal is leading the world in the revolutionary AR transformation and is the only company that has launched consumer AR glasses on a global scale. Widely recognized for its superior display technology and product design, Nreal has established partnerships with more than 10 world-renowned carriers and brought its product to six countries to date.

The Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup is seeking to reduce the number of CTS failures in MoltenVK under Vulkan 1.0 with no extensions. MoltenVK provides Vulkan functionality layered on top of the Metal graphics API on Apple devices. All RFP responses are due by 5p.m. PDT on Friday, June 24, 2022.

The Khronos SYCL Working Group is asking for your feedback on SYCL and the SYCL ecosystem. No matter your experience with SYCL, we’d love to hear from you. This includes using SYCL via another API, a library or framework, DPC++ in oneAPI, or some other means. The results will help us tailor the support of the SYCL ecosystem and prioritize future directions for SYCL Next. Please complete the Khronos SYCL Developer Feedback Survey

Three new Vulkan samples have been released in the past month:

• HPP Instancing Sample - NVIDIA provides a transcoded Instancing Sample that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings.
  
• Portability Sample - Holochip presents a tutorial demonstrating the use of the VK_KHR_portability_subset extension.
  
• Graphics Pipeline Libraries - Sascha Williams brings us this tutorial on the VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library extensions that allows separate compilation of different parts of the graphics pipeline. With this it’s now possible to split up the monolithic pipeline creation into different steps and re-use common parts shared across different pipelines.
  

PTC unleashes industrial innovation with award-winning, market-proven solutions that enable companies to differentiate their products and services, improve operational excellence, and increase workforce productivity. With PTC, and its partner ecosystem, manufacturers can capitalize on the promise of today’s new technology to drive digital transformation.

Using Monado, Colllabora’s open-source OpenXR runtime, intern Moses Turner completes a hand tracking project. In this blog, Moses guides us through the process, limitations, results and next steps.

The Khronos Group’s ANARI Working Group has issued a Request for Proposal. The working group has developed the ANARI software development kit (SDK) which needs an associated conformance test suite (CTS) to validate vendor implementations against the specification through the SDK. This project will develop a project plan with the ANARI working group for implementing the ANARI CTS. All submissions must be sent to [email protected] by 5PM PT on Friday May 27th, 2022. Please see a complete list of our RFPs here.

Fixstars is a software company devoted to “Speed up your Business”. Through its software parallelization/optimization expertise, its highly effective use of multi-core processors, and application acceleration for the next generation of memory technology that delivers high speed IO as well as power savings, Fixstars provides “Green IT,” while accelerating customers’ business in various fields.