As a rapidly-expanding Scottish technology company Codeplay Software is pleased to announce the appointment of Michael Wong as its new VP of Research and Development. This appointment also brings the expansion of Codeplay R&D into Canada, an indication of the success and growth of the Edinburgh team. Michael joins a highly skilled and experienced team developing software platforms for intelligent devices such as smartphones, robots and self-driving cars.

Michael Wong will continue his responsibilities as Director and VP of ISOCPP.org, a senior member of the C++ Standards Committee (WG21), Vice-Chair of Programming Languages for Canada’s Standard Council, Head of Delegation for C++ for Canada and chairing WG21 SG5 Transactional Memory and SG14 Games Development/Low Latency/Financials.

As VP of Research and Development at Codeplay, Michael’s focus will be on building out industry-wide support for high-performance acceleration using open standards. The latest developments in artificial intelligence use technologies developed in the video games industry for graphics, but now re-purposed to new uses. Enabling machines to see and understand their surroundings will enable cars to drive themselves; smartphones to understand speech without needing a network connection, and computers to learn from their surroundings and make themselves more useful to their users.

Codeplay are internationally-recognized experts in this field and contribute hugely to the open standard programming models that let software developers add intelligence to their machines. Michael will investigate market opportunities and technical needs, such as the requirements of the automotive vision market, as well as data centre acceleration and financial industry sectors. Michael will also develop Codeplay's academic engagements, creating research links with relevant academic institutions and businesses internationally, which can drive forwards Codeplay’s R&D collaboration activities.

Codeplay is growing rapidly, with over a dozen job openings currently available in its Edinburgh, Scotland headquarters and an expectation of further growth in its new Canadian base.

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About Michael Wong

Michael Wong is a current Director and VP of ISOCPP.org, a senior member of the C++ Standards Committee with 15 years of experience and Vice-Chair of Programming Languages for Canada’s Standard Council. He is the Head of Delegation for Canada to the C++ Standard Committee and the past CEO of OpenMP.

Michael Wong chairs the WG21 SG5 Transactional Memory and SG14 Games Development/Low Latency/Financials, and is the co-author of a number of C++/OpenMP/Transactional Memory features including generalized attributes, user-defined literals, inheriting constructors, weakly ordered memory models, and explicit conversion operators. He has published numerous research papers and is the author of a book on C++11. Having been the Technical Strategy Architect responsible for IBM's compilers and, previously, leading IBM’s XL C++ compiler team, he brings his current extensive research experience in C++ parallelism and concurrency models, lock-free programming, transactional memory, C++ benchmark performance, object model, generic programming, template meta-programming and future programming models to Codeplay.

Michael has been invited to speak and deliver keynotes at many conferences, universities, companies and research institutions including ACCU, C++Now, Meeting C++, ADC++, CASCON, Bloomberg, Activision/Blizzard, and CERN.

About Codeplay

Codeplay is internationally recognized for expertise in Heterogeneous Systems, and has many years of experience in the development of Compilers, Runtimes, Debuggers, Test Systems, and other specialized tools.

Codeplay has delivered standards-compliant systems for some of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, focusing specifically on high-performance heterogeneous processor solutions for CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and other specialized imaging and vision processors. Working within The Khronos™ Group to define new open standards such as OpenCL™, SPIR™, SYCL™, and Vulkan™, and leading the creation of new System Runtime and Tools standards through the HSA Foundation, Codeplay has earned a reputation as one of the leaders in compute systems.

The vast expertise gained in building optimized close-to-the-metal technology for customers has been utilized in developing Codeplay's ComputeSuite™ product. It combines the high-level ComputeCpp™ easy-to-use C++ standard development tools, with the low-level ComputeAorta™ heterogeneous runtime technology to ensure that open standards-based parallel software can run on the widest possible range of platforms and devices. By being modular and standards-based, software developers can mix and match components to ensure that their software runs anywhere and exploits the full power of the underlying system.

Throughout its history, Codeplay has also participated in international research projects, with partners from the largest hardware vendors to the most cutting-edge start-ups, and the expert academics in our field. The focus of these projects has covered optimizing high-performance graphics techniques at low power for mobile and embedded devices, ensuring that performance is portable and investigating its impact across a variety of different heterogeneous systems, and analyzing whether new compilation techniques can assist in making software faster and more power-efficient. The results of this research provide the drive for products that are made available to customers and associated developers.

Codeplay is recruiting for a range of engineering roles in its Edinburgh, Scotland base right now: https://www.codeplay.com/company/careers/