Beyond Real Time: Universality

Machine learning doesn't actually have a face.

But if it ever does, we'd like that face to look something like this.

The Arstechina quote says it all regarding AI, the open ended tech evolving faster than thought possible due to the rise of neural nets, the analog front end of AI but to make the code work on all platforms, an abstraction layer accepted by all must be created and now it's happening as we speak.

URZ will focus its research and programming efforts on a fundamental high-performance computing (HPC) challenge where modern computers utilize different types of hardware for different calculations. Accelerators, including graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), are used in combination with general compute processors (CPUs). Using different types of hardware make computers very powerful and provide versatility for a wide range of situations and workloads. Hardware heterogeneity, however, complicates software development for these computers, especially when specialized components from a variety of vendors are used in tandem.

One major reason for this complication is that many accelerated compute architectures require their own programming models. Therefore, software developers need to learn and use a different—and sometimes proprietary—language for each processing unit in a heterogeneous system, which increases complexity and limits flexibility.

oneAP's cross-architecture language Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), based on Khronos Groups' SYCL standard for heterogeneous programming in C++, overcomes these challenges with its single, unified open development model for performant and productive heterogeneous programming and cross-vendor support.

Why this is important.

URZ's collaboration on the oneAPI standard looks like it will be a good start toward fulfilling Intel's promises that oneAPI will be about all hardware, not just Intel's. The development efforts will be led by Aksel Alpay, who is specifically trying to bring AMD (Radeon) GPU support to oneAPI.

To fully understand this, we need to dive a little deeper into oneAPI's underlying technologies. OneAPI is built on top of Intel's Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), which is itself built atop C++ and Khronos SYCL code abstraction layer standards. Alpay is himself the founding developer of the hipSYCL implementation of the SYCL standard, and his work already explicitly supports multiple CPUs, Nvidia GPUs via CUDA, and AMD GPUs via ROCm. creating his exquisite paintings.