Participation is free and open to all safety-critical markets. All participants will be able to discuss use cases and requirements for a unified parallel programming interface for C++ to accelerate market growth. This API would be designed to reduce development and certification costs in safety-critical markets where using the SYCL higher-level programming model could improve programming productivity. If the Exploratory Forum reaches a significant consensus then Khronos will work to initiate a formal Working Group to develop SYCL SC specifications.

Michael Wong, Chair of the SYCL Working Group, and Intel’s James Reinders offer their perspectives on these key questions about SYCL:

• Elephant 1: Aren’t GPUs enough? Do other accelerators really matter?
• Elephant 2: Why not just use Nvidia CUDA?
• Elephant 3: Why not just use AMD HIP?
• Elephant 4: Why not just use OpenCL?
• Elephant 5: Can’t we just use C++ ?
• Elephant 6: Can SYCL queues can make it into ISO C++?
• Elephant 7: Who is behind SYCL? Is it really Open in the true sense of the word?
• Elephant 8: I see a herd of elephants – why should I believe in SYCL?

Intel recently released the oneAPI 2022 toolkits with new capabilities including the world’s first unified compiler implementing C++, SYCL and Fortran, data parallel Python for CPUs and GPUs, advanced accelerator performance modeling and tuning, and performance acceleration for AI and ray tracing visualization workloads.

Fresh from SC21, Rod Burns of Codeplay reviews SYCL activities at the conference and how researchers are increasingly switching over to SYCL for their HPC needs.

James Reinders from Intel considers how SYCL will contribute to a heterogeneous future for C++ and digs into SYCL from multiple angles. In this informative article he offers suggestions and tips on how to learn more.

The Khronos Group will be hosting a SYCL Webinar on December 7, 2021. The webinar will be technical in nature and is aimed at both existing SYCL users and HPC developers looking to hear about the very latest updates on the SYCL standard and it’s supporting ecosystem. The agenda is packed full with leading experts in the field. It is free to attend, and there will be a Q&A session at the end to answer any questions you may have.

oneAPI’s open, unified, cross-architecture programming model lets users run a single software abstraction on heterogeneous hardware platforms that contain CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators across multiple vendors. Central to oneAPI is the Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) project that brings Khronos SYCL to LLVM to support data parallelism and heterogeneous programming within a single source code application. SYCL is a royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer built entirely on top of ISO C++, which eliminates concerns about applications being locked in to proprietary systems and software.

Codeplay has been awarded a contract by Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to implement the oneAPI DPC++ compiler, an implementation of the SYCL open standard, to support AMD GPU-based, high-performance compute (HPC) supercomputers.

The Khronos Group and VeriSilicon are holding a joint Technical Tutorial and Workshop in Shanghai on April 22 & 23rd. The first day will be a virtual event and will include an overview of the Khronos Group and then deep dive into Vulkan and Vulkan Ray Tracing. On day 2, which will be onsite in Shanghai, the workshop will focus on OpenXR and parallel processing, vision acceleration and inferencing. Be sure to check out the event’s page for more information and register.

Join us online at the 9th International Workshop on OpenCL, including SYCLcon 2021, for four days of talks April 26-29,2021. There will be workshops and community networking aimed at furthering the collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst the international community of high-performance computing specialist working with OpenCL, SYCL, SPIR and Vulkan Compute. The event provides a rich mix of hands-on tutorials, technical presentations, research papers, posters, panel discussions, networking and vendor discussions. It also provides a formal channel for community feedback to the Khronos Group, the industry body responsible for the standards.

The collaboration between The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory and Codeplay Software seeks to enhance the LLVM SYCL GPU compiler capabilities for NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The collaboration will help NERSC and ALCF users produce portable, high-performance applications.

The full program of OpenCL and SYCL talks, tutorials, panel discussions and posters are now published for IWOCL and SYCLcon 2021 taking place April 26-29.

Intel has teamed up with Codeplay, HPE, and other institutions from industry and academia to form a “cross-industry, open, standards-based unified programming model that delivers a common developer experience across accelerator architectures”: oneAPI. This SYCL-based programming model is expected to become the primary vehicle for applications to leverage the computing power of Intel GPUs.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) are working with Codeplay Software to enhance the LLVM SYCL GPU compiler capabilities for NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The collaboration is designed to help NERSC and ALCF users, along with the HPC community in general, to produce high-performance applications that are portable across compute architectures from multiple vendors.

In this blog from University of Bristol, Tom Deakin, takes a look at the new features of SYCL 2020 and how they are being used in BabelStream. You can see the transformation at the GitHub Pull Request.

Updating BabelStream from SYCL 1.2.1 to SYCL 2020 resulted in fewer lines of code and 22% fewer characters thanks to some simplifications brought into the latest version of SYCL.