The SYCL 2020 Reference Guide project aims to improve the SYCL developer ecosystem by providing a more usable version of the SYCL specification. An online searchable reference is needed, along the lines of cppreference.com, through which developers can rapidly find relevant material in top ranked web searches or browsing.
Submit your bid by Monday, June 12, 2023!
Eight leading European organisations have joined in the Horizon Europe project, SYCLOPS (Scaling extreme analYtics with Cross-architecture acceleration based on Open Standards). The vision of SYCLOPS is to democratize AI acceleration using open standards, and enabling a healthy, competitive, innovation-driven ecosystem for Europe and beyond. This vision relies on the convergence of two important trends in the industry: (i) the standardization and adoption of RISC-V, a free, open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), for AI and analytics acceleration, and (ii) the emergence and growth of SYCL as a cross-vendor, cross-architecture, data parallel programming model for all types of accelerators, including RISC-V.
The goal of project SYCLOPS is to bring together these standards for the first time in order to demonstrate ground-breaking advances in performance and scalability of extreme data analytics using a standards-based, fully-open, AI acceleration approach. The SYCLOPS project partners are EURECOM, INESC ID, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitaet Heidelberg, CERN, HIRO-MicroDataCenters, AccelOM, Codasip, and Codeplay.
Khronos has today released the SYCL 2020 Revision 7 maintenance update with the following updates:
The agenda for IWOCL & SYCLcon 2023 has been announced! This premier event dedicated to developers using the OpenCL and SYCL APIs will take place in beautiful Cambridge, UK on April 18-20, 2023. It is a unique technical event bringing the developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the OpenCL and SYCL ecosystems. Early bird pricing is available until the end of March.
GROMACS, a popular molecular dynamics software, released v2023 with improved support for SYCL for Intel Arc, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA. The SYCL improvements has more GPU offloading features, RDNA support for AMD, SYCL optimizations for HPC platforms, and direct GPU to GPU communication.
Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, gave a keynote speech at inVISION on November 29th focusing on vision standards & the new Kamaros embedded camera API standard. The video from the keynote is now available (free registration required).
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™.
In this EE Times Europe article, Neil Trevett describes how the need for graphics and compute acceleration in embedded markets is growing. Cameras and sensor arrays are increasingly central to many use cases in diverse industries, ranging from automotive to industrial, and are generating increasingly rich data streams that require sophisticated processing. At the same time, advanced user interfaces are being developed using high-quality 3D graphics and even augmented-reality technology. However, the need to deploy accelerated processing, combined with the complexities of safety-critical certification, has created a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries. That has driven up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.
Open standards have an important role in helping hardware and software vendors navigate this complex technology environment. Acceleration standards for the embedded market can enable cross-platform software reusability, decouple software and hardware development for easier deployment and integration of new components, provide cross-generation reusability, and facilitate field upgradability. Such standards reduce costs, shorten time to market, and lower the barriers to using advanced techniques such as inferencing and vision acceleration in compelling real-world products.
Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, shares how open standards have an important role mitigating the complexities of safety-critical certification in a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries, that drive up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.
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:
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.
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
Join us to help drive the evolution of Machine Learning acceleration standards. ML developers lament the growing fragmentation in the ML ecosystem. Khronos knows that open and royalty-free standards can play an essential role in reducing fragmentation, reducing costs, and providing the industry participants the opportunity to grow. Based on feedback from previous summit and discussions, Khronos is creating a coalition of interested parties to meet the needs of the ML community for hardware acceleration.
