The Autoware Foundation and The UXL Foundation Collaborate on Achieving Software Portability for Open Source Autonomous Driving Stack
TOKYO, July 17, 2024—The Autoware Foundation has teamed up with The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) to create an alliance that will develop an open source software demonstration for autonomous driving, further strengthening the ecosystem for automotive compute accelerators. By looking at existing compute-intensive tasks, this collaboration and demonstration aim to show an automotive reference application utilizing the oneAPI specification and open source for acceleration, targeting various hardware accelerators, including GPUs. The Autoware Foundation, home to Autoware, is the world’s leading open-source project for autonomous driving and owns the popular Open AD Kit project, the first SOAFEE blueprint. The UXL Foundation is driving open accelerated compute, hosting multiple open source library projects and developing the oneAPI specification. The UXL Foundation is governed under the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation.
Several industry leaders, including the Autoware Foundation and its member companies, as well as UXL Foundation’s steering committee member companies have engaged in the project with contributions from Arm, Imagination Technologies, Intel and Qualcomm.
One of the goals of this collaboration is to show that the UXL Foundation libraries provide a performant and feasible path for the automotive industry to develop robust and portable software. By doing so, the effort required to deploy software on a diverse set of devices will be reduced, which is desired by automotive OEMs and Tier1s.
The common implementation will use a generic shared baseline running on the CPU to bootstrap this initiative.
This collaboration is to also enabling progress toward making Autoware software-defined by ensuring software portability across various hardware platforms. By introducing the oneMKL library to Autoware software via the Open AD Kit project, the Autoware software stack becomes less dependent on the underlying hardware and strengthens the flexibility when deploying on various hardware targets, regardless of vendor.
The main domains of interest to utilize within oneMKL are LAPACK, BLAS and FFT, while the main application of interest to demonstrate on Autoware’s software is LiDAR point cloud processing.
The collaboration between the UXL Foundation and the Autoware Foundation may extend to specific implementations in the future, allowing vendors to create an optimized solution for a specific target backend (such as using proprietary libraries, compiler, driver, and runtime) while keeping the application layer and the oneMKL layer consistent.
“The Autoware Foundation is excited to collaborate with the UXL Foundation to introduce software portability to the Open AD Kit initiative, leveraging UXL’s open SYCL Standard and versatile oneAPI specification. This collaboration is an excellent example of how to build a collaborative, hardware-agnostic and open autonomous driving software stack, requiring a wide range of automotive compute accelerators by achieving vendor-neutrality and maximizing reusability,” said Christian John, Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee at the Autoware Foundation and President of North America, TIER IV. “Autoware’s Open AD Kit project continues to be a prominent platform for developing and demonstrating SDV workloads by streamlining the process of architecting autonomous driving software solutions and providing a medium to build consensus.”
“The UXL Foundation is pleased to collaborate with the Autoware Foundation to bring portable software development to the automotive industry by combining libraries based on the oneAPI Specification and the SYCL Standard. New vehicles will likely have diverse accelerators such as CPUs, GPUs, and AI processors, and the ability to develop using open standards software is key.” said Rod Burns, chair of the UXL Foundation Steering Committee.
The Autoware Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts the Autoware project, the world’s leading open-source software project for autonomous driving. The Autoware project is built on Robot Operating System (ROS), and through using open source, it lowers the entry barrier to autonomous driving technology and enables commercial deployment of autonomous driving in a broad range of vehicles and applications. Autoware democratizes autonomous driving technology through open-source development and is committed to creating synergies among the world’s leading technology companies, academic/non-profit organizations, and individual contributors.
The Unified Acceleration Foundation is enabling solutions that are productive, performant, and provide customers with the freedom to choose the hardware that best fits their unique needs. To learn more about the Unified Acceleration Foundation, including how to get involved as a developer or member, visit UXLFoundation.org.
Useful Links
https://www.arm.com/markets/automotive
https://www.imaginationtech.com/products/automotive
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/automotive/overview.html
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/automotive/overview
Supporting Quotes
Arm
“Increased autonomy, advanced user experiences, and electrification are all driving a need for more software in the vehicle and emphasizing the importance of software portability and open standards,” said Suraj Gajendra, vice president of products and solutions, Automotive Line of Business, Arm. “This collaboration will bring UXL’s SYCL-based open standard for accelerated compute to the Open AD Kit project, enabling the Autoware Foundation to maximize reuse of its AI investments and demonstrating the value of the SOAFEE community in aligning the industry toward a common goal.”
Imagination Technologies:
“As a leading supplier of GPU IP, we understand the importance of robust, open, hardware-agnostic software stacks and APIs for customers wishing to maximise the long-term potential of their software investment while avoiding vendor lock-in,” said Shreyas Derashri Imagination VP of Compute at Imagination. “The Autoware and UXL Foundation collaboration is a perfect example of how hardware and software vendors can come together to accelerate the high compute perception, localisation and planning workloads that are critical to the future of autonomy. It is fitting that the oneAPI standard has established a foothold in automotive and is supporting the emergence of truly software-defined vehicles.”
