Codeplay are delighted to announce that we will be attending the annual Arm Research Summit on the 11th-13th September at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. Attending from Codeplay this year will be Ruyman Reyes, Principal Software Engineer, Programming Models and Mehdi Goli, Research Associate. Ruyman & Mehdi will both be presenting whilst at the Summit. Ruyman will be presenting the following talk: SYCL™: C++ to the Rescue of SoC Programmability and Mehdi will be presenting the following at the Poster session on Tuesday evening: OpenCL Acceleration for TensorFlow. We are always delighted to speak with anyone attending the event who is interested in what we are doing, so if you are attending, please come and say “hello”. If you are interested and would like to arrange a meeting with us at the event, please use our contact form or follow us on @codeplaysoft and make contact!

SYCL: C++ to the Rescue of SoC Programmability - Tuesday 12th September - 11.15am

System-on-Chip platforms have become complex pieces of hardware with many different components that are provided from different vendors with different requirements. Application developers are faced with the challenge of having to write applications that perform well on different configurations of SoC systems, taking advantage of different variants of specific processing units (e.g, DSPs, decoders or others). However, developing compute-intensive applications for SoCs is complex and requires interacting with different libraries, low-level APIs and even kernel languages.

Khronos open standard OpenCL solves part of this problem by offering a single interface for parallel computing that can be used for many different devices, however, it is a low-level language and still does not offer enough productivity for most application developers. In this session we will talk about SYCL, another Khronos open standard, that takes advantage of the portability of OpenCL but offers a simpler interface for developers.

ARM’s SoC component manufacturers that follow open standards such as C++, OpenCL or SPIR-V, can quickly take advantage of any application written using SYCL. SYCL offers a standard C++ interface that allows developers to design code following typical C++ design concerns (e.g. STL interfaces) while being able to interact with existing libraries, and execute on different components of the SoC with minimal changes.

 OpenCL Acceleration For TensorFlow - Tuesday 12th September - 18.30pm

Eigen is the most popular linear algebra library for C++ developers and recently it has been used within the open-source TensorFlow machine learning framework. Tensor, matrix, and vector operations are well placed in Eigen to be executed on parallel architectures to increase performance and reduce the overall power used by the hardware running these operations.

Until now Eigen has had limited support for parallel execution through mainly CPUs and NVidia GPUs. This poses a problem for developers, because only NVidia hardware supports the CUDA architecture and this excludes many GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and other specialized processors.

OpenCL, a Khronos open standard, offers an API that is supported by the majority of accelerator vendors such as Intel, AMD, and ARM. In this context SYCL, another Khronos open standard API, has been built on top of the OpenCL API to support performance portability on different OpenCL-enabled device, and to provide a single-source style C++ programming for heterogeneous systems.

Therefore, a SYCL backend has been added to the Eigen library in order to add support for a wide range of OpenCL devices, enabling frameworks such as TensorFlow to process deep neural networks faster and more efficiently. High performance is achieved by using pre-compilation to minimise run-time overheads and speed is increased in order of magnitude for large artificial intelligence applications.

This integration enables developers to target ARM-based SoCs with accelerators enabled by OpenCL using Eigen and TensorFlow.

The second annual Arm Research Summit is an academic summit to discuss future trends and disruptive technologies across all sectors of computing. The Summit includes talks from the leaders in their research fields, demonstrations, networking opportunities and the chance to interact and discuss projects with members of Arm Research. If you are currently working on, or have an interesting new idea that you would like to talk about, and get instant peer feedback, the Arm Research Summit is the event you cannot afford to miss. More on conference can be found here - Arm Research Summit 2017

Codeplay are hiring, if you're interested in working for Codeplay then please follow the attached link & apply directly to any of the positions we have advertised. Please ensure the following documents are attached to your application: Cover Letter, CV and Code Samples - Codeplay Careers