Khronos APIs for Heterogeneous Compute and Safety: SYCL and SYCL SC - Michael Wong, Nevin Liber & Verena Beckham - CppCon 2023 https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2023

Khronos is an international consortium, non-profit standards consortium that is open to all, with royalty-free standards for the industry to use. Our focus is on enabling applications to access the power of acceleration for 3D graphics, virtual and augmented reality, and parallel computation. For the last 5 years, Khronos has sponsored a Quiet room for attendees to use. Khronos specializes in 3D acceleration APIs including Vulkan and OpenGL, and the new ANARI API for scientific visualization, initiatives around 3D asset formats including glTF; the OpenXR API standard for portable augmented and virtual reality; and most relevant to C++, a family of APIs and languages for parallel computation, vision acceleration and inferencing.

These are specifically SYCL which has been presented before, and continues to evolve to serve all hardware acceleration targets or fall back to CPU if there are no accelerators. There is also now SYCL Safety Critical which we will showcase its continuing progress and adoption in the automotive domain by AUTOSAR.

SYCL is a C++ language framework that uses template libraries to dispatch selected parts of a standard C++ application to acceleration processors. SYCL enables complex C++-based applications and libraries, such as complete machine learning frameworks, to be directly compiled and accelerated to performance levels that in many cases outperform hand-tuned code. Offloaded C++ code is sent to the SYCL compiler for the target accelerator processors, that often uses OpenCL as a backend, the remainder of the C++ code is sent to the C++ compiler for the host CPU. This talk will have parts that discuss how ISO C++ is integrated into SYCL and how SYCL influences ISO C++. These include mdspan and/or executors.

SYCL SC is in early stages of a new WG that has completed a 1 year gap analysis on what is need to safety in C++ offload accelerators, for improved determinism, better robustness that implements error handling, and smaller SPI to reduce efforts for certification.

This talk will describe most recent progress in Khronos SYCL and SYCL SC, as well as areas that SYCL relates to C++, such as mdspan, and its use in both High Performance computing, and the safety critical industry, such as our collaboration with AUTOSAR.