The Khronos Group, an industry consortium with more than 100 members working together to create open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing, has received strong industry support for its OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard at the SC09 conference.
OpenCL is the open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming across CPUs, GPUs and other processors. It provides software developers portable and efficient access to the full power of a wide range of systems including high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices.
'By enabling cross-platform development for heterogeneous architectures, OpenCL is helping to bring GPU compute capability to mainstream applications,' said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing at AMD. 'AMD fully supports the advantages of industry standard development through its ATI Stream SDK v2.0, an OpenCL 1.0 compliant solution for both ATI GPUs and x86 CPUs.'
Ben Bergen, evolving applications and architectures team, Los Alamos National Laboratory, commented: 'Our development experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory with adapting codes to the Roadrunner supercomputing architecture exposed several areas where there were no obvious tools or techniques that would allow us to maintain portability across the variety of platforms that we must routinely support to fulfil the Laboratory’s stewardship mission. Initial proof-of-concept experiments with the OpenCL framework make us optimistic that OpenCL can address many of the challenges that we will be facing as the HPC landscape evolves into the future.'
The membership of the Khronos OpenCL working group has grown steadily since the release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification, with a rich diversity of companies helping to evolve and support the specification. Membership in the OpenCL working group now includes 33 market leaders, including AMD, Apple, ARM, Ericsson, Fujitsu, GE, IBM, Intel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Motorola, Nokia, Nvidia, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba, among others.
