Authors: Aksel Alpay and Vincent Heuveline (Heidelberg University)

The SYCL ecosystem currently contains four major SYCL implementations: Codeplay’s ComputeCpp, Intel’s LLVM/clang implementation, triSYCL led by Xilinx and hipSYCL led by Heidelberg University. HipSYCL, an open source project available at https://github.com/illuhad/hipSYCL, is the first SYCL implementation that does not build on OpenCL, providing instead CUDA/HIP and OpenMP backends that allow it to target CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and AMD GPUs. Since hipSYCL builds on the CUDA/HIP clang frontend, augmented with a clang plugin to add support for SYCL constructs, it is inherently interoperable with existing CUDA or HIP codebases, vendor-optimized libraries, and can expose latest hardware features such as intrinsics as soon as they become available in the clang CUDA/HIP toolchain.