Opencl tagged news

LLVM recently released Clang 14. New OpenCL features include the ability to generate a SPIR-V binary, support for OpenCL 3.0 and more...

OpenCL developers can try out new provisional OpenCL/Vulkan Interop functionality today with NVIDIA’s latest drivers and downloadable sample code.

In Basis Universal’s v1.16 release, it focuses on smaller code size, less 3rd party dependencies (just Zstd), OpenCL support, faster ETC1S encoding, and fully multithreading/parallel processing.

• ETC1S encoding is now approximately 30% faster. We added more optimizations to the encoder’s backend and more SSE optimizations to the frontend.
• Optional OpenCL support has been added to the ETC1S encoder.

GPUinfo.org enables the community to build extensive databases of Khronos API driver capabilities by uploading reports from diverse end-user devices and platforms. With more than 20,000 device reports available for Vulkan, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES across Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX, and iOS, GPUInfo.org has become a widely used resource for developers to gain detailed insights into deployed hardware support for features they wish to use, including devices for which they don’t have direct access. As a brand new addition, GPUInfo.org now offers a client application and server-side database for the OpenCL™ standard for cross-platform, heterogeneous parallel programming at opencl.gpuinfo.org.

C++ for OpenCL is a community-based, open-source C++ kernel language for OpenCL that combines full OpenCL C with most features of C++17, implemented in Clang and LLVM. Using the new ‘year of release’ versioning scheme, the draft documentation for C++ for OpenCL 2021 language is now released on GitHub for developer review and feedback. C++ for OpenCL 2021 is fully compatible with OpenCL 3.0 as the same features are made optional in both.

The OpenCL working group today released the OpenCL 3.0.10 specification including the latest round of maintenance updates, clarifications and bug fixes - in many cases responding to issues and questions from the OpenCL developer community.

This latest specification includes updates for readability and accessibility, such as improved syntax highlighting, as well as new and updated extensions which are outlined in the blog.

Khronos has made substantial investments in strengthening the SPIR-V backend for LLVM and the OpenCL Working Group is pleased to release early results from testing that provide insights into compilation coverage using the OpenCL conformance test suite and LLVM’s tests. Work in the past months has been dedicated to the overall design of LLVM’s new backend and its integration with the Clang frontend, with particular focus on parsing OpenCL kernel language sources. Khronos will soon finalize this design and commence integration into the upstream LLVM repository. To speed progress, a special panel is going to take place at the LLVM Developers Meeting to discuss the overall design and formulate a concrete list of actions.

Following the release of OpenCL™ 3.0 in September 2020, The Khronos Group continues to expand and grow the ecosystem of this open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of diverse accelerators found in supercomputers, cloud servers, personal computers, mobile devices, and embedded platforms.t The OpenCL Working Group is announcing new extensions for two key use cases: boosting neural network inferencing performance, and providing flexible and powerful interoperability with new-generation graphics APIs, including Vulkan. 

Microsoft’s merge request to Mesa has been submitted bringing SPIR and SPIR-V support to the CLOn12 effort to allow OpenCL over DirectX 12 through Mesa.

Microsoft's latest contribution to Mesa is an EGL implementation that changes Mesa's WGL front-end code to allow a Windows EGL implementation with a WGL driver for EGL. This Windows EGL support is merged for next quarter's Mesa 21.3 release.

Arm engineers are working on a C++ equivalent support for LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end. They are pursuing "C++ for OpenCL 2021" as the C++ equivalent to OpenCL 3.0.

A paper presented at the Fifth Workshop on Computer Architecture Research with RISC-V (CARRV 2021), concentrates wholly on off-the-shelf RISC-V chips – introducing support for the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) heterogeneous programming framework commonly used to spread scientific workloads across CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. The OpenCL implementation, which resulted from the team’s research, required no changes to the processor designs themselves, and is compatible with a range of parts – from high-performance multi-core processors to low-profile embedded implementations.

OpenCL 3.0.8 has been released with new integer dot product extension. An especially useful extension for accelerated inferencing using quantized neural networks.

Portable Computing Language (POCL) announced the release of version 1.7. Highlights include:

• Support for Clang/LLVM 12
• Improved support for cross-compiling
• Improved support for SPIR-V binaries when using CPU device
• Implemented OpenCL 3.0 features
  

Today, at the 9th International Workshop for OpenCL (IWOCL and SYCLcon 2021) Khronos has released the OpenCL 3.0.7 specifications, with a number of new extensions for extended bit-level operations, new queries for suggested local work group size and PCI device information, and enhanced SPIR-V support for debugging and linking. OpenCL 3.0 was released in September 2020 and Imagination, Intel and NVIDIA are already shipping conformant implementations. A Khronos IWOCL slide deck has more details on numerous recent updates and improvements to the OpenCL developer ecosystem.

Find out more about OpenCL this week at IWOCL and SYCLcon 2021 with a Panel Session including OpenCL Working Group members together with Microsoft and Silhouette FX on Wednesday April 28th. On Tuesday April 27, Brice Videau from Argonne National Lab will present a tutorial on OpenCL SDK Layers. Free Registration is now open for this virtual event.