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.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the finalized SYCL 1.2.1 specification. SYCL for OpenCL enables code for heterogeneous processors to be written in a “single-source” style using completely standard modern C++. The multi-vendor SYCL 1.2.1 standard is available royalty-free for industry use, and the full specification together with details about the SYCL open-sourced conformance test suite and Adopters Program are online.

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.