Intel's Codeplay Announces oneAPI Construction Kit For Bringing SYCL To New Hardware

Codeplay Software, which was acquired by Intel last June, has an exciting announcement to make today in the form of the oneAPI Construction Kit. This open-source project aims to help ease bringing up SYCL on new processor/accelerator architectures, particularly around HPC and AI. The oneAPI Construction Kit also has a reference implementation for RISC-V.

The oneAPI Construction Kit is for helping to bring the Khronos SYCL programming model to custom accelerators and other currently unsupported architectures. The oneAPI Construction Kit is for helping to bring the Khronos SYCL programming model to custom accelerators and other currently unsupported architectures. Codeplay announced in today's press release:

"With software evolving quickly, it has become increasingly common for hardware vendors to create specialist AI processors that run their software more efficiently than would be possible with out-of-the-box hardware. While these custom processors can offer the advantage of performance, they come with challenges for developers. Primary among these is the challenge of enabling the latest software on the latest generation of processors. This can involve major software porting efforts to proprietary and non-standard programming models, creating additional work for customers, who will need to work on time-consuming optimizations and porting for their applications.

The oneAPI Construction Kit was created to solve these challenges by bringing all the benefits of simplified heterogeneous programming to custom hardware. It extends oneAPI to custom architectures and makes it easy to access a wealth of supported SYCL libraries. This has tangible benefits for your customers who, rather than having to learn a new custom language for custom hardware, can instead use SYCL to write high-performance applications efficiently. All of this means less time spent on porting efforts and maintaining separate codebases for different architectures, and more time for innovation.

Codeplay has previously demonstrated a full software programming environment using oneAPI and SYCL for the next generation of RISC-V vector processors using the oneAPI Construction Kit."

More details on the oneAPI Construction Kit are available from developer.codeplay.com.

The oneAPI Construction Kit is open-source under an Apache 2.0 (with LLVM Exceptions) license and hosted on GitHub.

The oneAPI Construction Kit is just one of many efforts by Intel for ensuring SYCL and their oneAPI software stack can run on a diverse range of CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Many oneAPI components themselves are already enjoying support on AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA. Prior to Codeplay Software being acquired by Intel they were already working on bringing SYCL to NVIDIA GPUs and Radeon GPUs. The openness of the oneAPI ecosystem has been great and it's excellent to see Intel continuing to make further progress on cross-vendor/hardware compatibility.