The Khronos Group was at SC17 this year with booth talks on OpenCL and SYCL from Khronos members Codeplay and Xilinx. The presentations slides and videos of all the booth talks are now available on the Khronos SC17 event page.

Codeplay has set out its intention to lead the development of guidelines to ensure that standards like OpenCL and SYCL meet the strict safety requirements for a range of industries by leading the Khronos SCAP. Illya Rudkin, Principal Software Engineer at Codeplay, is now leading the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Panel and continues the work done by Erik Noreke to establish the panel. Erik was a long time member of Khronos and well respected for his leadership in numerous working groups. On his appointment Illya said “My role is to continue the work by Erik and grow the participation of both Khronos members and external safety experts within the group. I also hope to enable the group to bring current and new open standards into the safety domain. The demand for safety critical software is growing and we have to ensure adopters of our standards can implement complex systems, often involving multiple layers, as efficiently possible with minimal concerns to safety cases.” Learn more about the goals that Illya has for The Safety Critical Advisory Panel. Please contact Khronos if you would like more information about becoming a member, or joining and advisory panel.

Michael Wong from Codeplay Software and Hal Finkel from Argonne National Library have opened up the ‘Distributed and Heterogeneous Programming in C++ for HPC’ BOF to questions from the internet. If you have a related question you would like to ask, please post it here.

A new Codeplay post we presents a utility to facilitate the integration of SYCL into existing codebases that are not C++11 friendly. If your application uses malloc and frees for allocation, or has some existing CUDA®-based memory management, the “Legacy Pointer” and/or the “Managed Virtual Pointer” utilities can help you to integrate your code with SYCL.

Codeplay has announced that ComputeCpp Community Edition is now available on Windows. It is now possible to develop SYCL applications using Windows and Visual Studio. The Windows release of ComputeCpp CE currently supports Windows 7 or 10 and can be used with Visual Studio 2015. Similar to our Linux version, the hardware you want to use with ComputeCpp you is required to have SPIR OpenCL drivers in order to be supported.

Announcing that the 6th International Workshop on OpenCL will take place on the 14-16 May, 2018 at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK and that the Call for Submissions is now open. Submissions related to any aspect of using OpenCL (including SYCL, Vulkan Compute and OpenCL based libraries) are of interest, including (but not limited to): case-studies of their use in applications, software tools, programming methods, debugging, performance analysis, and integration.

Renesas Electronics announced their collaboration to deliver ComputeAorta™, Codeplay’s OpenCL open standard-based software framework for Renesas R-Car system-on-chips (SoCs). The new framework is designed to support software development for the R-Car’s latest image recognition IP, the IMP-X5, a multi-threading core optimized for computer vision and cognitive processing. Codeplay will also provide R-Car with ComputeCpp™, an implementation of the SYCL™ open standard, enabling single source C++ software for high level and object-oriented programming. The result of this collaboration provides developers with standard software development tools and support for a wide range of open source computer vision or open source deep learning software, such as TensorFlow™ library.

Codeplay announces SPIR-V support for ComputeCpp in v0.3.0. This beta implementation of SPIR-V for OpenCL support means that developers can use SYCL and ComputeCpp to develop for any OpenCL hardware that includes a driver that consumes SPIR-V.

The Khronos Group held their annual BOF-Blitz at SIGGRAPH today. There were five BOFs in all, and they were all a huge success. If you were not able to get to SIGGRAPH and you missed the live stream, you can now watch the video online here.

Codeplay helping ensure software developers are correctly equipped to host their software applications on RISC-V. Codeplay is working extensively with machine learning solutions such as Google with TensorFlow to bridge the gap on RISC-V with OpenCL and SYCL open standards.

Join the Khronos Group in Booth 304 @ SC16. There will be people in the booth from the Khronos working groups who can answer your technical questions about OpenCL, SYCL, and SPIR. Visit the Khronos Booth for your free HPC t-shirt, OpenCL sticker, and reference guides for OpenCL and SYCL. Khronos members Xilinx and Codeplay will be in the booth to answer questions, give talks, and show demos. This year at SC Khronos will show where OpenCL fits in with the larger pantheon of open standards for HPC in a panel held on Wednesday 10:30am in room 255-BC.

Codeplay is giving developers free, early access to ComputeCpp with a pre-conformance beta implementation of the SYCL open standard, along with an open-source preview of the latest Parallel Technical Specification to be adopted into C++17. Other open-source projects being made available are VisionCpp, a machine vision library demonstrating C++ techniques for performance-portability, and an early version of the Eigen C++ library that uses SYCL for acceleration on OpenCL devices.

The Khronos Group has posted video from all of the Khronos BOFs on Youtube. The following video and all the matching presentations are now ready to view:

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces the immediate availability of the OpenCL™ 2.2, SYCL™ 2.2 and SPIR-V™ 1.1 provisional specifications. OpenCL 2.2 incorporates the OpenCL C++ kernel language for significantly enhanced parallel programming productivity. SYCL 2.2 enables host and device code to be contained in a single source file, while leveraging the full power of OpenCL C++. SPIR-V 1.1 extends the intermediate representation defined by Khronos with native support for shader and compute kernel features to fully support the OpenCL C++ kernel language. These new specifications can be found at www.khronos.org and are released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback before finalization, including at the Khronos forums.

This blog post is first in the series of “how-to” articles on developing and porting applications using SYCL for OpenCL.