Welcoming new co-chairs of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation Steering Committee
September 18, 2025
Welcoming new co-chairs of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation Steering Committee
The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL Foundation) is a Joint Development Foundation project, part of the Linux Foundation. The foundation’s leadership plays a pivotal role in steering innovation and progress in the accelerating landscape of technology.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the appointment of Manuj Subharwal, Director of Product Management AI Software at Qualcomm, and Andrew Wafaa, Senior Director Software Communities and Fellow from Arm, as the new co-chairs for the UXL Foundation’s steering committee.
What began five years ago with the oneAPI specification and its open-source implementations has become a catalyst for the future of technical computing. The UXL Foundation now brings together contributors from across sectors to champion openness, performance, and choice, transforming how innovation scales from cloud to edge and everywhere in between.
Rod Burns from Codeplay has acted as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the past two years. Rod has grown the UXL Foundation to over 40 members and guided projects under open governance with a vendor-neutral approach. He has stepped down as chairperson, and we thank him for all of his leadership and accomplishments to date in establishing and growing the UXL Foundation.
Visionary Leadership
Both Manuj and Andy bring a wealth of experience and a visionary approach to the Unified Acceleration Foundation. Manuj is at Qualcomm and was previously with Intel Corporation as an AI Principal Engineer.
Andy has been involved with several Linux Foundation projects for over a decade, as well as open-source foundations. He has been involved with the UXL Foundation since its inception.
Both chairs have the relevant experience in driving open source communities and consistently demonstrated a commitment to driving technological advancements and fostering collaboration across diverse sectors.
A Catalyst for Vendor-Neutral Innovation
The Unified Acceleration Foundation is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of cutting-edge technologies, providing vendor-neutral APIs and libraries for the commonly used building blocks in HPC and AI. By unifying efforts across industries, the foundation aims to create a robust ecosystem that supports innovation and addresses the challenges of today and the future.
Strategic Goals and Initiatives
Under the leadership of the new co-chairs, the UXL Foundation will focus on several strategic goals, including:
- Expanding Collaboration: Strengthening partnerships with industry leaders, academic institutions, and other organizations to contribute to the projects. Educating developers with better guides and documentation, and improving UXL Foundation’s web presence. Expanding the Continuous Integration setup to better cover member platforms, by giving members better access and input, and removing reliance on any one member to provide services. Growing our engagements with peer projects to better embed UXL within the AI space.
- Increasing project independence: Driving open accelerated compute with public infrastructure so that the projects are genuinely independent. Increase the number of maintainers and more contributions from other organizations.
As Manuj and Andy take the helm, the UXL Foundation is in a great position to push forward an open ecosystem for developers looking to accelerate their software on a range of hardware architectures. With a focus on expanding collaboration and increasing project independence, the foundation aims to provide all the key building blocks for vendor-neutral acceleration of a range of workloads, from AI to HPC and edge environments.
We invite you to join us in congratulating Manuj and Andy. Please give them your full support to continue to drive the UXL Foundation in its mission to build a multi-architecture, multi-vendor software-accelerated ecosystem for all processors.
Stay Connected
To stay updated on the latest developments and initiatives from the Unified Acceleration Foundation, follow us on
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@UXLFoundation
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/unified-acceleration-foundation-uxl
Join our Linkedin Group:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14241252/
Visit our websites:
Sign up for the mailing lists to receive invites and find out about upcoming UXL Foundation SIG meetings.
Please check the calendar for details of upcoming meetings, and we welcome proposed topics for any of our meetings, so get in touch if you want to present.
