It's time again for IWOCL , the International Workshop for OpenCL, and we are excited to be able to discuss the latest developments and research as well as meet the OpenCL and SYCL communities in Boston, USA from 13th to 15th May, 2019.

This is also the third year that we are hosting DHPCC++ alongside IWOCL. DHPCC++ is a full day of talks and discussion focused on heterogeneous programming using C++. This year we will see comparisons of different frameworks as well as talks on new implementations of compilers and libraries developed in C++ for heterogeneous hardware. Michael Wong from Codeplay will be hosting this conference and Gordon Brown, Senior Software Engineer at Codeplay will be presenting on the latest developments in adopting parallel implementations into standard algorithms as part of ISO C++. Take a look at the schedule here and be sure to book your place soon as space is limited.

IWOCL is the place where the latest releases and announcements are made by Khronos about OpenCL and SYCL. One of the main themes we are expecting Khronos to talk about is machine learning. There are now Khronos groups from Vulkan, SYCL, OpenVX, NNEF and OpenCL all working on addressing the needs of the machine learning community. The second thing we predict Khronos to be talking about is the SYCL community; the working group tripled in size during the past 12 months and contributions are being made towards the ratification of a new version of the SYCL standard in 2019.

We are seeing continued and growing industry support for the OpenCL and SYCL open standards at IWOCL, with speakers from Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA and MediaTek alongside speakers and attendees from many other companies. This past year we have seen an acceleration for the adoption of SYCL, with developers looking for a way to develop cross-platform high performance code that can be benchmarked and deployed across a range of hardware suitable for their system; whether that is in HPC or embedded systems with size and power constraints. During the past year there have been big announcements that solidify SYCL as the preferred solution.

• Imagination Technologies have announced their commitment to include SYCL support in their hardware platforms
• Codeplay were extremely pleased to announce ComputeCpp v1.0, the world's first SYCL 1.2.1 conformant implementation.
• Intel have begun contributing a SYCL compiler implementation to the LLVM project for GPUs, FPGAs and DSPs
  
• The open source hip-SYCL project is gaining momentum to provide SYCL support for NVIDIA and AMD hardware.

These bring together the pieces of the jigsaw required for the mass adoption of SYCL into applications for markets such as self-driving cars, high performance computing and mobile.

Within the open source space Red Hat's Dave Airlie has been at various conferences presenting their vision of an open source, open standard compute stack (you can see one of his presentations here) and it will be interesting to hear from his colleague Jerome Glisse at IWOCL. The title of Jerome's talk is "Blurring the boundaries between CPU and GPU" and we expect to see how Red Hat plan to create a heterogeneous compute stack for developers without vendor lock-in. This is a big topic for developers who want to write portable cross-platform code for heterogeneous hardware architectures, and Tobias Stauber and Peter Sommerland from the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil will be talking about their CUDA to SYCL research and converter during the IWOCL Poster Sessions.

Safety Critical is another hot topic as we see heterogeneous hardware being utilized, in particular, by the automotive industry. Illya Rudkin from Codeplay recently wrote a blog post that discusses how open standards are broadening the supply options for automotive OEMs. He also explains how Khronos is working to address the strict safety requirements needed to deliver this hardware and software to consumers by helping to deliver a safe compute stack using open standards. At IWOCL you can hear Codeplay's VP Research and Development and Chair of the SYCL standard working group Michael Wong presenting the Landscape of C++ Heterogeneous Computing and Safety Critical. He will talk about how Codeplay are working with many groups including the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum to help deliver this safe computing stack.

Within the automotive industry, hardware vendors including Renesas and Imagination Technologies have already stated publicly their adoption of SYCL and OpenCL to enable the development of complex systems capable of performing advanced artificial intelligence. As the move towards self driving vehicles gathers momentum, hardware that combines performance and power efficiency must be achieved. Gordon Brown from Codeplay will be presenting "How to Deploy AI Software to Self Driving Cars" with an insight into how SYCL and OpenCL have been implemented for the Renesas R-Car hardware family achieving the performance and power efficiency needed.

Machine learning continues to grow rapidly, and is being adopted by a wide range of new and existing applications. One of the challenges for developers however is that the libraries and frameworks powering machine learning applications are locking developers into specific hardware vendors. For example, the CuDNN framework provides accelerated convolution operations necessary for processing the neural networks used by machine learning but it is limited to NVidia hardware. Deploying the same code on another vendor's hardware would potentially require a large amount of re-factoring and porting. To address this John Lawson from Codeplay is presenting "Accelerated Neural Networks on OpenCL Devices Using SYCL-DNN." The presentation will show how SYCL-DNN offers the same operations as a framework like CuDNN offering great performance and ease of portability across a wide range of hardware from many vendors.

As well as the presentations Codeplay will also be showing off some demos at the conference and we'll be giving away a limited number of t-shirts and stickers celebrating ComputeCpp becoming the world's first SYCL 1.2.1 conformant product. Come and see us at our table and say hello!

There's lots of reasons to come along to DHPCC++ and IWOCL this year so get your ticket before space fills up and we look forward to seeing you there. If you would like to organize a meeting with us get in touch through our website or on Twitter @codeplaysoft .

Codeplay are hiring, if you're interested in working for Codeplay then head over to the Codeplay Careers section on our website.