oneAPI-Focused UXL Foundation Now Collaborating With The Khronos Group

Last year it was announced that Intel's oneAPI software initiative evolved into the UXL Foundation for making compute accelerators more open as well as opening things up to more cross-vendor collaboration and adoption. Intel started the Unified Acceleration Foundation with the Linux Foundation, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others. Announced today is that the UXL Foundation has begun collaborating with The Khronos Group.

The UXL Foundation for driving the oneAPI specification has entered into a liaison agreement with The Khronos Group to push SYCL for C++ programming of AI, HPC, and safety critical systems. Intel's oneAPI has relied on the Khronos-defined SYCL for single-source C++ programming to target the range of Intel hardware / accelerators. While SYCL has played a fundamental role in the oneAPI ecosystem, it's not been until now that there's been an official agreement for collaboration -- now with the UXL Foundation.

Today's Khronos announcement about this liaison agreement reads:

"At the heart of the UXL-Khronos liaison is a mutual desire for cooperation and synergy to help foster the rapid evolution of a vibrant and open ecosystem to support heterogeneous programming. Both organizations aim to align their strengths, particularly in how SYCL from Khronos evolves to meet developer requirements as well as supporting and complementing the UXL Foundation libraries, and open source projects—and vice versa.

This cooperative spirit is driven by a shared commitment to advancing the industry for the greater good and ensuring that the combined efforts of both organizations lead to advancements that help developers write performance portable heterogeneous applications from a single C++ code base."

This collaboration will focus not only on the technologies but also on building a community and ecosystem for SYCL and oneAPI thriving together. This collaboration makes a lot of sense and frankly surprising it wasn't initiated a long time ago. This software ecosystem collaboration is also important for taking on the big green giant, NVIDIA, with its walled garden versus UXL/Khronos for an open industry software programming effort supported by multiple vendors.

Those wishing to learn more about this UXL Foundation and Khronos collaboration can read more at Khronos.org.