17 June 2008

Khronos Rolls Out Heterogeneous Computing Initiative

The Khronos Group, an industry consortium, is calling for industry participation to create an open, royalty-free standard for programming parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs.

The creation of this open standard is intended to enable and encourage diverse applications to leverage all available platform compute resources on a wide range of platforms.

Initial participants in the working group include ARM, along with 3Dlabs, AMD, Apple, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Graphic Remedy, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, QNX, Qualcomm, Samsung, Seaweed, TI, and Umeå University.

“The Compute Working Group potentially will be one of the most significant standardization efforts at Khronos. Highly-accelerated parallel computation across GPUs and CPUs is essential to many emerging rich consumer applications that will transform the computing experience of diverse users,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.

"Significantly, this initiative is aimed at both desktop and embedded devices – the day when you will be able to hold a supercomputer in the palm of your hand is perhaps not so far away," added Trevett.

The Compute Working Group will follow proven Khronos processes and invite member contributions as a basis for standardization efforts, Khronos explained.

Apple has proposed the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification to enable any application to tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU and CPU resources through an approachable C-based language. A widely available open-standard compute programming specification with high-performance, general computation support and robust numerics will complement existing solutions and further liberate GPU-based compute power from the realm of graphics-only applications and provide a multi-vendor, portable interface for coordinating all the many-core GPUs and multi-core CPUs within a system. Such capability will have broad applicability - including a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem by providing a powerful compute front-end to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, and a platform for accelerating tasks such as physics and image processing / recognition.

Representatives from Khronos and the Compute Working Group will be available in person for briefings at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, US running from 11-15th August 2008. For further details go to: www.khronos.org.