Codeplay are pleased to announce that Andrew Richards, CEO & Founder, Charles Macfarlane, VP Marketing & Rod Burns, Developer Relations Manager, will be at this year’s AutoSens in Brussels, exhibiting from 17th to 20th September. Codeplay will be there to discuss the use of open standards such as OpenCL and SYCL on heterogeneous processor solutions to enable the latest vision and machine learning applications for automotive.

Codeplay’s ComputeCpp 1.0 enables SYCL and provides C++ developers with ‘High Performance Computing’, ‘Computer Vision’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’. “Codeplay continues to lead the SYCL community, as demonstrated by the release of ComputeCpp 1.0 featuring the industry’s first fully conformant SYCL 1.2.1 implementation,” said Codeplay’s Michael Wong, chair of the SYCL working group and senior member of the ISO C++ Standards committee. “This latest release will empower developers to more easily harness the power of heterogeneous computing. It also helps improve the experience for developers by making it easy to write applications that can take greater advantage of the compute capabilities present in a range of CPUs, GPUs, and other processor types.” Learn more about ComputeCpp 1.0 and SYCL, or read up on the history of Codeplay and SYCL.

In our research project HighPerMeshes, physicists use Maxwell’s Equations to simulate nanoantennas and interferences within different materials. Our goal is to provide a technology that enables the implementation of simulation codes in a simpler and more productive fashion, while at the same time allowing them to deploy to different target devices and accelerators. We decided to use SYCL to analyze and re-write a set of example code to solve Maxwell’s equations because it allowed us to develop using standard C++, target a wide range of hardware, and gave us the opportunity to accelerate the code on this hardware.

The Khronos Group announces the availability of the SYCL Adopters Program for the C++-based programming framework for parallel programming. Under the Adopters Program, implementers of SYCL 1.2.1 can access an extensive conformance test suite, and then upload their test results to Khronos for review and the opportunity to become officially conformant. Together with the SYCL Adopters Program, Khronos also announces the release of a maintenance update for SYCL 1.2.1, delivering specification clarifications that enable enhanced run-time optimizations.

In April, Khronos introduced the Safety Critical Advisory Forum in response to developers’ growing concerns and demands of functional safety standards on hardware and software. The advice and support that the forum provides to Khronos Working Groups directly contributes to the creation of SC APIs. Members and non-members can contribute in the forum, this blog outlines the benefits of participation.

The Khronos Group standards logos are now available for download on Sketchfab. Sketchfab makes it easy for anyone to publish and find 3D content online. Available logos currently include OpenXR, OpenCL, NNEF, OpenVX, SPIR, Vulkan, WebGL, SYCL and glTF. OpenGL has not been overlooked and will be arriving shortly.

The Khronos Group member Codeplay has two posts on their contributions to OpenCL and SYCL, and expands on some of the topics surrounding SYCL at the upcoming IWOCL conference. Codeplay has been an IWOCL supporter since its inaugural edition 5 years ago. Check out the post by Michael Wong entitled ‘Heterogeneous Development at the DHPCC++ 2018 Workshop’ and the post by Rod Burns ‘What’s happening with SYCL at IWOCL 2018’.

Codeplay are excited to again be attending and sponsoring the annual OpenCL conference IWOCL on the 14th – 16th May in Oxford, UK. Codeplay is looking to meet new and old faces from the OpenCL and SYCL community, so if you are attending come and say “hello”. The team will be wearing their Codeplay t-shirts and hoodies and will be easy to spot. Learn more about the IWOCL conference and what Codeplay is presenting.

This blog will give a quick run through of the SYCL profiling features that have been developed in the latest version of LPGPU2 CodeXL. LPGPU2 CodeXL is not yet available to the public but it was made available to the LPGPU2 consortium during February 2018. It is the aim to make a version of CodeXL with SYCL profiling features available when the project is completed.

Khronos member Renesas Electronics has outlined their plans for ADAS and self-driving cars. Renesas is working with Codeplay Software Ltd., experts in high-performance compilers and software optimization for multi-core processing. The collaboration allows programs already written in CUDA for Nvidia’s SoC to be brought to R-Car SoCs, using Codeplay’s OpenCL open standard-based software framework. The framework, first made available on R-Car H3 as a proof of concept, is now coming to the R-Car V3M and other R-Car SoCs of Renesas’ autonomous platform for both ADAS and automated driving.

Codeplay has written up a detailed run through of how they how they ensure C++ fundamental types are translated correctly from SYCL code through to OpenCL, retaining their correct size and signedness.
If you’re an application developer, this will help you learn a little about how SYCL works under the hood. If you’re looking to implement SYCL, this will help you find a way to get the compiler to do your lifting for you.

The Khronos recently announced SYCL 1.2.1. The SYCL 1.2.1 specification has improved on the existing 1.2 standard by introducing new features which allow for better integration with existing machine learning and OpenCL-based frameworks such as TensorFlow as well as various improvements based on user feedback. This is an exciting piece of news for Codeplay is it enables them to work towards full compliance of SYCL 1.2.1 for ComputeCpp, and their v0.5 release which is now available to download. Read more about how Codeplay is using SYCL 1.2.1 with ComputeCpp v.0.5.0.

Codeplay has a very good write-up today on machine alternatives that don’t use Neural Networks. The included code, SYCL-ML was developed as a proof of concept to show what a machine learning application using heterogeneous computing can look like and has been published as an open source project. The project was developed using SYCL and ComputeCpp, which is an implementation of SYCL developed by Codeplay.

Neil Trevett, Khronos Group President and Radhakrishna Giduthuri, Software Architecture and Compute Performance Acceleration at AMD, spoke at two Khronos related events this past week. Neils presented was an update on the Khronos Standards for Vision and Machine Learning which covered Khronos Standards OpenVX, NNEF, OpenCL, SYCL and Vulkan. Radhakrishna presented Standards for Neural Networks Acceleration and Deployment covered Khronos Standards OpenVX and NNEF. The slides from both presentations are now online.