Cool Stuff

(great links to resources)

I often mention “cool stuff” in my talks – this page is a link to more information for various “cool stuff” so you can connect with the material directly.

I am a huge believe in open choices – not just open software, but true openness that comes from open governance. Real choice. When our programming code is not portable, innovation is slowed and our choices are limited artificially.

I hope the links below help connect you to useful programming information, and help you see ways to use and support making the future open for us all.

AI PC Development

CPU: Fast Response + GPU: High Throughput + NPU: Power Efficiency

The CPU handles smaller and diverse workloads with low latency. The GPU handles large and symmetric workloads that require parallel throughput. NPU handles sustained heavily-used AI workloads with much less power and greater efficiency.

Unified Acceleration Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s UXL (Unified Acceleration Foundation) is an important player in the world of helping create an open future for us all.

More information can be found at https://github.com/uxlfoundation/foundation.

This is an important foundational effort that holds the power to help our C++ level code be open and portable, and equally importantly to help many things higher on the stack be open and portable.

Learn more by visiting their official site: www.uxlfoundation.org

The Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation exists to define a standards-based, cross-architecture open specification for accelerated computing and to foster the open-source implementations of the specification.

The community is invited to join the meetings, review the oneAPI Specification, and read the information in this repo. Contributions can be made by joining the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) or posting comments or questions as GitHub issues. General questions can go to this repo, and issues specific to parts of the specification can go to the Specification repo.

The public calendar of UXL Foundation meetings is available using Google Calendar.

You can join, or just watch what is happening. Of course, I encouraging joining! It is very important to support efforts to create open access for all software and hardware so we all enjoy the benefits of having portability and the freedom to choose what vendors we use at all times!

SYCL – open C++ access to accelerators of all vendors and architectures

C++ programmers should learn SYCL because it is Khronos standard for proving open standard which has great support for using accelerators regardless of vendor or architecture!

Here are key ways (read them all!) to get better informed quickly:

Intel Developer Cloud with Free Training Courses

Cloud access to Intel technologies. Training courses on the hardware are free. Dedicated access to new hardware is very affordable. Sign-up, learn more, and take training courses for free!

Recommended reading: “A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture“

Simply a must read!

by John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson
Communications of the ACM, February 2019, Vol. 62 No. 2, Pages 48-60
10.1145/3282307 (direct access: PDF)

CUDA to SYCL information (training, examples, etc.)