ISC High Performance 2024
ISC24 was back in Hamburg for another year where the AI and HPC community gathered to hear about the latest research and advances in technology. We were represented at ISC by many of our members both in the exhibition hall and also in the presentations. Hopefully you were able to pick up some of our giveaways at our member booths.
The conference began with tutorials over the weekend and I was lucky to be joined by Chris Edsall from Cambridge University, Aksel Alpay from University of Heidelberg,and Igor Vorobstov from Intel where we led an interactive introduction to working with SYCL. There were a lot of great questions from the audience and a variety of attendees interested in using SYCL, both from an application perspective as well as using SYCL with their own hardware designs.
On Monday, I joined the Birds of a Feather session for the High Performance Software Foundation, which was announced at ISC. Todd and Christian Trott introduced the foundation projects and their goals which included working closely with other groups, including the UXL Foundation. Some of the HPSF projects use UXL Foundation libraries for portability on different GPUs and we will also take advantage of some of the HPSF projects for packaging and distribution. I look forward to seeing how we can collaborate.
Later on Monday I was given space in one of our member booths (Intel) to present and talk to ISC attendees about the UXL Foundation. This was a great opportunity to meet people who were new to the foundation as well as existing members.
The sessions at ISC increasingly talked about the heterogeneous world we live in, and this is reflected in the number of different hardware architectures that are being made available. This is particularly prominent in the AI space with lots of innovation happening, with new hardware aiming to increase the performance of inference while using less power as well as more powerful and faster processors for cloud based workloads.
There was a keynote presentation on Tuesday evening from Andrew Richards, Codeplay CEO, Intel ISC 2024 Keynote | Intel and I was honored to be invited on to the stage to talk more about what we are doing in the UXL Foundation. Another walk on was made by UXL member Samsung talking about the work they are doing to define standards for new memory innovations. Andrew’s presentation was focused on how open innovation is crucial for future technology innovation, and the UXL Foundation plays a part in that, bringing together the industry to define and implement the building blocks developers need to write accelerated software.
On Wednesday there was a good discussion at the RISC-V Ecosystem Birds of a Feather session. There is an increasing interest in heterogeneous architectures using RISC-V, whether that is RISC-V CPUs alongside GPUs or new innovative accelerator architectures based on the RISC-V standard. On the same day was a ‘Birds of a Feather’ session focused on the use of parallel ISO C++ code, with updates on the latest C++ version and additions. The evolution of C++ is highly relevant for the UXL Foundation with the oneDPL project implementing new parallel routines and features defined by the ISO C++ group. The session had a lot of good questions and there is definitely strong motivation from the community to bring more parallel programming capabilities to the language and this takes a lot of work to bring it to the C++ standard.
Overall ISC was a great place to meet the community, to help bring new members to the UXL Foundation, talk to existing members and hear about the latest innovations and research in the AI and HPC world
