SYCL Strongly Supported by Codeplay Software at SuperComputing 2019

07 November 2019

Codeplay join experts in Denver to provide a keynote talk and join panel sessions discussing the strengths of SYCL for HPC




  • The SuperComputing conference is the largest gathering of high performance computing experts in the world, with over 11,000 attendees.
  • Each year, SuperComputing provides the leading technical program for professionals and students in the HPC community, as measured by impact, at the highest academic and professional standards.
  • The Program is designed to share best practices in areas such as: algorithms; applications; architectures and networks; clouds and distributed computing; data analytics, visualization, and storage; machine learning and HPC; performance; programming systems; system software; and state of the practice in large-scale deployment and integration.

While traditionally high performance computing has seen use of interfaces such as FORTRAN, in the past few years there has been a rapidly growing interest in using C++ for HPC applications. In fact, this year at SC19 there are many sessions talking about C++, and more specifically SYCL, with a range of sessions presenting research projects using SYCL, providing a forum for discussion and explaining how to develop using SYCL.

Andrew Richards (CEO), Michael Wong (VP R&D and SYCL WG Chair) and John Lawson (AI Software Expert) from Codeplay will be at SuperComputing 2019 (SC19) in Denver, Colorado and are ready for a packed agenda that includes more SYCL talks than ever before.

What does the SYCL agenda at SC19 look like?

The conference kicks off on Sunday 17th November when the Fifth International Workshop on Heterogeneous High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (H2RC 2019) hosts two presentations focused on SYCL. The keynote talk is by Ronan Keryell from Xilinx where he outlines the benefits of using SYCL for FPGA programming in a talk entitled "SYCL: A Single-Source C++ Standard for Heterogeneous Computing." Later in the morning at 11:00am Michael Kinsner and John Freeman from Intel present "Data Flow Pipes: A SYCL Extension for Spatial Architectures" describing the pipes extension that enables a more usable and flexible interface.

Also on Sunday 17th November, Codeplay CEO Andrew Richards will be on stage at HPC Day with The Next Platform conducting a live interview entitled "Toward an Open Ecosystem for HPC and AI Compute" at 4:20pm.

On Monday 18th November things begin with a keynote talk from Codeplay's Michael Wong at the IA^3 2019 workshop. This is followed later in the day at 4:25pm with a panel "Convergence, Divergence, or New Approaches? - The Future of Software-Based Abstractions for Heterogeneous Supercomputing" where Fernanda Foertter from NVidia will discuss with panellists Jeff R. Hammond (Intel), Jack Deslippe (LBNL), Christian Robert Trott (Sandia National Labs), Michael Wolfe (NVidia) and Johannes Doerfert (ANL) what interfaces are available to developers looking to take advantage of accelerator processors. We expect a heated debate on the advantages of the various options including SYCL.

Also running on the 18th November is Intel's Breakthrough AI+HPC conference at SC19 where they have organsed a wide range of workshops, tutorials and presentations. SYCL will play a role here too after Intel's announcement of it's OneAPI initiative and DPC++ interface that implements the SYCL standard. You can learn about DPC++ with a technical overview presentation and if you want to do some SYCL coding, there is a hands-on-lab. Codeplay CEO Andrew Richards will be presenting at the Intel event, his talk An Open Ecosystem for HPC Developers will cover the current SYCL ecosystem from top to bottom.

Moving on to Tuesday 19th November, Hal Finkel and Michael Wong will lead a Birds of a Feather called "Heterogeneous and Distributed ISO C++ for HPC Status and Directions" at 5:15pm. The focus of this BoF is to encourage discussion and knowledge sharing of where the future C++ ISO standard is heading, in particular with regard to parallel applications.

Thursday 21st November, the penultimate day of SC19 sees the Khronos Group, developers of the SYCL open standard host a Birds of a Feather session focused on the current and future plans for SYCL. Join the group at 12:15pm along with Simon Mcintosh-Smith from the University of Bristol and Michael Wong, chair of the SYCL standard.

The final day of SC19, Friday 22nd November, includes a session comparing the implementation and performance of a Wilson Dslash Stencil Operator Mini-App using Kokkos and SYCL starting at 8:50am. Bálint Joó from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility along with co-authors will present their benchmark results and experience of developing this operator using both SYCL and Kokkos.

If you'd like to organise a specific time to meet our team at SC19 get in touch via our contact form and we will set something up.

Codeplay Software Ltd has published this article only as an opinion piece. Although every effort has been made to ensure the information contained in this post is accurate and reliable, Codeplay cannot and does not guarantee the accuracy, validity or completeness of this information. The information contained within this blog is provided "as is" without any representations or warranties, expressed or implied. Codeplay Sofware Ltd makes no representations or warranties in relation to the information in this post.
Rod Burns's Avatar

Rod Burns

VP Ecosystem