My Experience at SYCL HackFest @ IWOCL 2024

My name is Osman EI-Ghotmi and I am a graduate student at the University of Ottawa. My work as an academic researcher focuses on the development and implementation of high-performance numerical solvers for the solution of hyperbolic-relaxation partial differential equations (PDEs) that can efficiently make use of large heterogeneous computing facilities with thousands of hardware accelerators and hundreds of thousands of compute cores. I have been leveraging the SYCL framework to optimize and scale the code to these computing facilities.

 

In addition to my academic work, I am also the founding contributor of the PySYCL open-source project. PySYCL is an open-source Python interface for SYCL that enables Python applications to leverage SYCL-based functionalities for heterogeneous computing. PySYCL aims to abstract away the complexities of GPU programming and provide to Python users an easy-to-use numerical library that efficiently targets hardware accelerators.

 

Since both my academic work and open-source project require a very efficient and optimized use of the SYCL framework, it was the perfect opportunity for me to attend the IWOCL 2024 SYCL Hackfest. At the event, I had the chance to collaborate with many experienced SYCL developers and work towards optimizing and debugging different aspects of both my research and PySYCL code. The hacking was great and the friends that I made were even better. The SYCL hackfest was also a wonderful event for different members of the SYCL community to socialize and get to know each other.

 

I look forward to attending this amazing event for many years to come.