ISC22, May 29th – June 2nd 2022, Hamburg, Germany.

The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) is back in Germany, and this will be the first time the European HPC community has been able to meet here face-to-face for more than 2 years.

This is an exciting opportunity for the SYCL community to meet and discuss.

The oneAPI DevSummit kicks off as a pre-ISC online event on Friday 27th May with a schedule of what I expect to be insightful topics. Codeplay’s Joe Todd will be presenting on migrating from CUDA to SYCL, explaining how he ported a nbody simulation from CUDA to SYCL, whilst continuing to target Nvidia GPUs and retaining performance. Later in the schedule I will be hosting a panel session on SYCL Best Practices. If you are new to SYCL development, and even if you are an experienced SYCL developer you’ll learn something important from this group of experts. Registration is free and separate from ISC.

There is a SYCL tutorial at ISC, which is the first opportunity we have had for a long time to teach SYCL in person and face-to-face. Whilst I have enjoyed being able to reach a worldwide audience through the online SYCL tutorials during the past couple of years, getting back to teaching in person is really exciting. Join "Heterogeneous Programming in Modern C++ with SYCL” on Sunday 29th May with a well respected group of tutors including Peter Zuzek, Principal Engineer at Codeplay and SYCL Working Group member. This tutorial covers some great introductory topics and throws in a case study using an image convolution to give you a feel for some real code.

On Monday 30th May there is a Birds Of a Feather (BoF) session dedicated to SYCL led by some key members of the SYCL Working group including James Brodman from Intel, Aksel Alpay from the University of Heidelberg and Tom Deakin from the University of Bristol. If you have not attended a BoF before be prepared for discussion during an interactive session where you can field your questions to the many experts in attendance. The floor is genuinely open so get involved.

On the final day of ISC22, Thursday 2nd June, the "Portable Heterogeneous with SYCL" workshop is being hosted by my colleague, Distinguished Engineer and SYCL Working Group chair Michael Wong, in my absence alongside Aleksander Ilic and Raja Appuswamy. You’ll hear talks on some key topics, and I’ll now touch on what to expect. Tobias Weinzierl will deliver the keynote presentation, going into detail of how they are using SYCL to implement a complex equation system solver. Following that there will be more in-depth topics:

·       A talk from Sameer Shende who is part of the US Exascale Computing Project working on the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack.

·       Szilard Pall, who has worked on accelerating the popular GROMACS project, will talk about how SYCL is central to their plans for supporting current and future target processors.

·       Matrix-free solvers are part of Igor Baratta’s research and he will reveal how these can be implemented using SYCL.

·       My colleague Peter Zuzek and team have been working on improving the performance of the ComputeCpp SYCL implementation, and he will present how using Address Space Inference brought significant benefits for SYCL developers.

·       A crucial part of SYCL is the ability to develop extensions, and often these are used to demonstrate the next generation of SYCL features, Igor Vorobtsov will talk about some of the available extensions.

There’s a lot to learn at ISC and some great opportunities to engage and discuss with the community. Register on the website and join the largest HPC conference in Europe.

If you want to meet one of my colleagues at ISC in Germany get in touch via our web form or Twitter.