March 19, 2014 – San Francisco, Game Developer’s Conference – The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of SYCL™ 1.2 as a provisional specification to enable community feedback. SYCL is a royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer that enables the development of applications and frameworks that build on the underlying concepts, portability and efficiency of OpenCL™, while adding the ease-of-use and flexibility of C++. For example, SYCL can provide single source development where C++ template functions can contain both host and device code to construct complex algorithms that use OpenCL acceleration - and then enable re-use of those templates throughout the source code of an application to operate on different types of data.
The SYCL 1.2 provisional specification supports OpenCL 1.2 and has been released to enable the growing community of OpenCL developers to provide feedback before the specification is finalized. The specification and links to feedback forums are available at: www.khronos.org/opencl/sycl.
While SYCL is one possible solution for high-level parallel programming that leverages C++ programming techniques, the OpenCL group encourages innovation in diverse programming models for heterogeneous systems, including building on top of the SPIR™ low-level intermediate representation, using the open source CLU libraries for prototyping, or through custom techniques.
“Developers have been requesting C++ for OpenCL to help them build large applications quickly and efficiently and there are lots of useful C++ libraries that want to port to OpenCL,” said Andrew Richards, CEO at Codeplay and chair of the SYCL working group. “SYCL makes this possible and we are looking forward to the community feedback to help drive the final release and future roadmap. We are especially keen to work with C++ library developers who want to accelerate their libraries using the performance of OpenCL devices.”
SYCL 1.2 Features
SYCL 1.2 will enable industry innovation in OpenCL-based programming frameworks:
[ul]
[li]API specifications for creating C++ template libraries and compilers using the C++11 standard;[/li][li]Easy to use, production grade API that can be built on-top of OpenCL and SPIR;[/li][li]Compatible with standard CPU C++ compilers across multiple platforms, as well as enabling new SYCL-based device compilers to target OpenCL devices;[/li][li]Asynchronous, low-level access to OpenCL features for high performance and low-latency – while retaining ease of use;[/li][li]Khronos open royalty-free standard - to guarantee ongoing support and reciprocal IP coverage;[/li][li]OpenGL® Integration to enable sharing of image and textures with SYCL as well as OpenCL;[/li][li]Development in parallel with OpenCL – future releases are expected to support upcoming OpenCL 2.0 implementations and track future OpenCL releases.[/li][/ul]
SYCL Homepage
An Overview of SYCL 1.2
OpenCL DevU at GDC 2014