Podcast: Expanding the SYCL 2020 Ecosystem

Open standards underpin the future of heterogeneous programming, and as Intel Principal Engineer Jeff Hammond points out, SYCL has proven in many ways that “standards don’t cost you a thing and you get portability.” A modern C++ language, SYCL has demonstrated amazing growth and now boasts four implementations—ComputeCpp, triSYCL, hipSYCL and DPC++. hipSYCL Creator Aksel Alpay explains some of the differences between these implementations, and how hipSYCL is evolving to incorporate DPC++ features contributed to the SYCL 2020 specification, including unified shared memory (USM), reductions, group algorithms and subgroups. The two also dive into a discussion of buffers and accessors, and Aksel debunks a few myths around hipSYCL.