First introduced in 2014 by the Khronos Group®, SYCL™ is a C++ based heterogeneous parallel programming framework for accelerating high performance computing (HPC), machine learning, embedded computing, and compute-intensive desktop applications on a wide range of processor architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and tensor accelerators. SYCL 2020 launched in February 2021 to bring a new level of expressiveness and simplicity to developers programming heterogeneous parallel processors using modern C++, and further accelerating the deployment of SYCL on multiple platforms, including the use of diverse acceleration API backends in addition to OpenCL™.