[Edinburgh, April 2024] - Axelera AI, the leading provider of purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology for generative AI and computer vision inference, has adopted the oneAPI Construction Kit from Codeplay Software to enable heterogeneous, open standards programming for their Metis AI Processing Unit. With the exponential growth of AI applications demanding increased performance, Axelera AI continues to pioneer the adoption of open standards and heterogeneous computing, empowering developers to utilise new and diverse hardware with a single source code.

Codeplay has developed the oneAPI Construction Kit to allow the SYCL open standard to be easily brought to new hardware. SYCL is an open-standard parallel to C++, enabling the same source code to run across diverse hardware. SYCL is defined by the Khronos Group. oneAPI is an open source software platform for accelerated computing, based on the SYCL standard. oneAPI includes libraries such as oneDNN that are optimized for different accelerators, and the ecosystem of software around oneAPI is rapidly growing. Recently, the oneAPI specification and open source projects have been brought under governance of the UXL Foundation.

Using the oneAPI Construction Kit, Axelera was able to bring OpenCL and SYCL to their Metis AIPU. Axelera emphasises, “The choice of programming interface is not just a technical decision but a strategic one for businesses. Open standards like OpenCL and SYCL offer portability, collaboration, and code reuse, ultimately increasing developer productivity.”

“The oneAPI Construction Kit is a great resource to rapidly benefit from the extensive ecosystem already existing and benefiting many AI and HPC programmers.” said Charles Macfarlane, Chief Business Officer of Codeplay. “Portability and performance are at the heart of our work and this means open source with open standards is critical to solutions”

Axelera has shared their experience using the oneAPI Construction Kit in a case study, which demonstrates how it is possible to rapidly enable SYCL code for a broad set of processors such as their Metis AIPU architecture. For more information, read the case study here.