hipSYCL Gets New Compilation Toolchain For Taking SYCL Directly To CUDA & ROCm

Could 2019 be the year that SYCL really takes off for this single-source C++-based programming model? There's certainly a lot of interesting projects going on around SYCL.

Intel is making very interesting moves and among them are working on upstreaming SYCL support in LLVM. It appears this SYCL play of theirs will be a key part of their "oneAPI" effort that is supposed to be out by year's end.

Separately, others in the ecosystem are making strides around SYCL. The hipSYCL open-source project that has been working on implementing SYCL over NVIDIA's CUDA and AMD HIP/ROCm scored another major achievement.

The hipSYCL project has introduced a new compilation toolchain for compiling SYCL code directly for CUDA and ROCm by making use of the LLVM Clang CUDA / HIP front-end. Previously hipSYCL has relied upon source-to-source transformations.

Big news: We now have a new compilation toolchain in #hipSYCL based on a clang plugin. This allows us to compile #SYCL code *directly* for #CUDA and #ROCm with #clang's CUDA/HIP frontend, without source-to-source transformation! Faster compilation and more robust! pic.twitter.com/TcCGApPiY4

— Aksel Alpay (@illuhad) May 12, 2019

With this Clang-based plug-in they are now able to go directly into Clang / LLVM IR and bypassing the source transformations and thus should allow for more optimizations and other improvements moving forward.

Those wanting to learn more about hipSYCL itself can visit GitHub.