At Intel’s developer conference, Intel Innovation 2022, Tim Mattson, Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel Labs, delivered a session on accelerated computing in which he offered a simple yet profound observation.
“High performance used to be exclusively scientific computing–‘Big Science’”–but “what’s happening now is the range of applications where performance is a central feature–not a nice to have but an essential feature–has expanded beyond classical HPC to emerging workloads in AI, analytics, content creation, and graphics.”
This focus on performance has been fueled by a proliferation of accelerator hardware architectures—GPUs, FPGAs, specialty ASICs, and CPUs with integrated accelerator engines–that can be used in varying combinations.
Evans Data found that 48% of developers are developing applications that target heterogeneous systems that use more than one type of processor (Evans Data Corp Global Developer Survey Report 22.1).
However, developers who implement these systems have had to deal with the complexity of different programming models for each type of accelerator.
As Mattson pointed out, if you’re a developer, “this is not tenable.” Mattson’s vision is “a world where developers write parallel code once and it runs on any system…open standards, multiarchitecture, multivendor.”
This is where the oneAPI industry initiative comes in. oneAPI is based on SYCL from the Khronos Group,* a C++ programming model designed to target heterogenous architectures across a mix of processor types and vendor architectures.
Andrew Richards, CEO of Codeplay, an Intel company, explained that “If you write your code in SYCL…you’re using industry-standard C++, and you then have the choice to run on any hardware you want.”
Watch Tim Mattson’s overview of the oneAPI industry initiative, Intel developer tools, and his conversation with Andrew Richards on the benefits of SYCL
For more of Tim Mattson’s perspective on adoption of oneAPI, see his blog: Centers of Excellence Lead Adoption of oneAPI’s Vision (intel.com).
You can also watch the full session on Accelerating Developer Innovation Through An Open Ecosystem.
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