This year is expected to be the biggest IWOCL & SYCLcon conference of all time and Codeplay is contributing with various sessions over 4 days from 26-29 April. The conference is online for the second year in a row and couldn't be easier to attend - it's free and on demand with some live elements. Register now on the conference website.

What's happening at IWOCL and SYCLcon 2021

On Monday 26th April (10:00am-6:00pm CET) in partnership with IWOCL and SYCLcon is the oneAPI Developer Summit. oneAPI is a cross-industry standards-based platform with SYCL at its core and offering a set of libraries to enable specific compute inntensive operations. The agenda for this event is looking very interesting, kicking off with a panel discussion involving some of the SYCL implementers including ComputeCpp represented by Codeplay's Peter Zuzek and DPC++ for CUDA represented by Codeplay's Steffen Larsen. The remainder of the day brings a good mix of talks from HPC developers making use of SYCL and organizations implementing open standards on different hardware platforms. In particular Biagio Cosenza from the University of Salerno will be talking about how his cross-organization team brought SYCL to the Celerity framework which is being used on massively parallel systems.

If you are new to SYCL programming or want to brush up your SYCL skills, you need to block off the day on Tuesday 27th April and join the Hands-On Introduction to SYCL Tutorial. This session is being presented live by engineers from Codeplay, Intel, University of Heidelberg and Xilinx who are some of the most experienced experts in SYCL. The session is very focused on hands-on work and is a great way to grasp the essentials you will need for SYCL development. By the end of the day we expect you to be able to write your own SYCL kernels and understand the main concepts required to build more complex applications.

On Tuesday 27th April at 10:00am CET IWOCL and SYCLcon moves to technical presentations, panels and poster sessions with more than 20 technical talks on both OpenCL and SYCL selected by a programming committee of experts from across the industry. Codeplay has 5 separate presentations covering some of the work we have been doing in the past 12 months, and I'll talk about some of these and why you should watch them.

As part of the keynotes, Codeplay's Michael Wong will present his annual "State of the Union." Michael is the chair for the SYCL Working Group and will give an update on the SYCL standard's evolution and state of the SYCL community.

Codeplay is playing a huge part in helping developers migrate away from proprietary CUDA to SYCL through our contribution of DPC++ for CUDA. Steffen Larsen along with our partners from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have contributed a poster session entitled "Bringing SYCL to Ampere Architecture." This describes the work Codeplay is doing to bring SYCL programming to the Nvidia A100 based Perlmutter supercomputer which will be used by the US National Laboratories for running crucial research applications. Find out how to try out SYCL with your Nvidia GPU by visiting the poster session.

An area that is rapidly evolving is the use of SYCL and OpenCL in safety critical applications such as automotive. Illya Rudkin from Codeplay has been working on understanding the challenges that integrating SYCL and OpenCL into vehicles brings, in particular as the evolution towards autonomous vehicles approaches. Illya examines how open standards bring a host of benefits to this area but also talks through the challenges that we are also facing. Make sure to join the "Can SYCL and OpenCL Meet the Challenges of Functional Safety?" session if you would like to learn more about this, and also how you can contribute to moving SYCL forward in safety critical.

Machine learning has increased the use of programs that are based on graphs, and has made graph programming accessible to even novice programmers. Erik Tomusk from Codeplay will explain how OpenCL can be used to express graphs for accelerator processors efficiently and with high performance in the talk "Executing Graphs with OpenCL." There are some misconceptions about how graph programming can map to OpenCL and this talk will help to convince you about the best solutions for machine learning applications.

System-on-chip manufacturers are building specialist accelerator processors based on the RISC-V architecture, and the Vectorized (RVV) extension enables these to match compute performance seen on GPUs today. Colin Davidson and Aidan Dodds from Codeplay present "Enabling OpenCL and SYCL for RISC-V processors" where they explain how Codeplay is enabling OpenCL and SYCL for processors implementing the RVV extension, and how this can be adapted for a wide range of hardware types.

The annual OpenCL and SYCL panels will take place on Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th respectively at 17:00 CET live involving Alastair Murray and Michael Wong from Codeplay. These panels are live and give you the opportunity to ask those difficult questions of the experts.

Why you Should Attend IWOCL and SYCLcon 2021

From Codeplay's experience the past 2 years has seen huge momentum behind the SYCL open standard, and we are seeing more and more developers migrating their codebases from CUDA to SYCL. This is making it possible to escape proprietary lock in and brings the opportunity to target many processors from different manufacturers. From the conference program we can see evidence that many of the world's semiconductor companies are adopting openness, from Intel's migration to open source and open standard support for their processors, through to Kalray's adoption of OpenCL for their latest generation of chipsets. SYCLcon is also probably the best conference for not only learning how to develop with SYCL but to also see the very latest research, and there are many very relevant papers in cutting edge fields.

How you can Watch and Interact with the Presentations

Simply register on the IWOCL/SYCLcon website to get free access for all the sessions. You'll be sent instructions before the conference on how to join the live sessions, and links to where the recorded presentations will be available when published from the 27th to 29th of April.

Talk to Codeplay at IWOCL and SYCLcon

While it's a different experience when attending an online conference it's still possible to have interesting discussions, and learn new things from your peers by participating through the online channels.

We'd also like to make it possible to interact with attendees from Codeplay as if the conference were a physical event.

The conference has set up Slack channels that enable participants to chat, debate and provide an opportunity to ask the presenters questions on their talks. More details will be shared by the organizers.

Additionally, if you participate in the SYCL tutorial sessions, or the live talks you can post your questions live on our channels and the team will be online ready to answer and discuss them.

You can also engage with the team on social media channels.

Find Codeplay on Twitter if you have any questions.

Our CEO Andrew Richards is a regular on Twitter, and is always keen to debate about parallel programming and processors.

Rod Burns, our VP Ecosystem is on Twitter and is always interested to know what developers are looking for from SYCL.

Join us and many others from the community for IWOCL and SYCLcon online. Register on the event website and log on from the 26th-29th of April.

SYCL is a trademark of the Khronos Group Inc. Nvidia and CUDA are registered trademark of NVIDIA Corporation. OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos. Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.