Khronos to detail OpenCL standard on Monday

Khronos announced it will give a technical briefing of OpenCL at SC08 in Austin, Texas on November 17. OpenCL is a new open, royalty-free standard for programming heterogeneous parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs, the standard is backed by industry-leading companies including AMD, Apple, ARM, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, RapidMind and Texas Instruments.

OpenCL enables portable programming of the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute capability and is designed to support a wide range of applications, from consumer software all the way to HPC solutions, through a low-level, high-performance, device-independent abstraction.

OpenCL enables software developers to effectively take full advantage of heterogeneous processing systems – from high performance compute servers, through desktop computer systems to handheld devices - that can include a diverse mix of parallel CPUs, GPUs and accelerators such as Cell processors or DSPs.

By creating an efficient, close-to-the-metal programming interface, OpenCL is intended to form the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools, middleware, and applications.

This informal gathering will provide one of the first opportunities for the HPC community to gain an insight into the architecture and direction of this exciting development.