Artifical Intelligence tagged news

NVIDIA recently published beta drivers that introduce the recently released VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 extension in Vulkan 1.4.311 build. This extension allows for Brain Float BF16 operations within shaders in conjunction with the SPV_KHR_bfloat16 extension from SPIR-V. BFloat16 extensions should prove particularly useful for modern GPUs and software supporting Vulkan-accelerated machine learning / AI. 

In a world where AI, HPC and Safety-Critical acceleration is shifting toward heterogeneous architectures that integrate processors with different architectures from multiple vendors, the need for seamless interoperability and shared open standards has never been more critical. That’s why the UXL Foundation (Unified Acceleration) and the Khronos Group have entered into a liaison agreement to help accelerate the evolution of open accelerated heterogeneous programming.

Eight leading European organisations have joined in the Horizon Europe project, SYCLOPS (Scaling extreme analYtics with Cross-architecture acceleration based on Open Standards). The vision of SYCLOPS is to democratize AI acceleration using open standards, and enabling a healthy, competitive, innovation-driven ecosystem for Europe and beyond. This vision relies on the convergence of two important trends in the industry: (i) the standardization and adoption of RISC-V, a free, open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), for AI and analytics acceleration, and (ii) the emergence and growth of SYCL as a cross-vendor, cross-architecture, data parallel programming model for all types of accelerators, including RISC-V.

The goal of project SYCLOPS is to bring together these standards for the first time in order to demonstrate ground-breaking advances in performance and scalability of extreme data analytics using a standards-based, fully-open, AI acceleration approach. The SYCLOPS project partners are EURECOM, INESC ID, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitaet Heidelberg, CERN, HIRO-MicroDataCenters, AccelOM, Codasip, and Codeplay.