The Khronous Group, the standards organization behind OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenCL and other key software standards technology, announced this week that OpenCL (at versions 1.0) had made significant industry progress.
OpenCL conformance tests are now available with new conformant products now shipping. Additionally, the OpenCL Working Group membership has expanded to 33 members in the areas of high-performance computing, gaming, middleware, system and silicon vendors. Participating at SC09, an international conference for high-performance computing, Khronos Group members will be highlighting the power and scalability of OpenCL.
OpenCL Products – Trademark Use and Conformance
Before a product can use the OpenCL trademark it must pass a conformance test suite by Khronos for OpenCL 1.0. This suite was released in May 2009 and a number of shipping products have successfully passed including products from AMD, Apple and Nvidia.
In the case of Apple its latest operating system, Snow Leopard, utilizes OpenCL. Apple created OpenCL and opened it up as an industry standard giving control of the standard to the Khronos Group.
“By enabling cross-platform development for heterogeneous architectures, OpenCL is helping to bring GPU compute capability to mainstream applications,” said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing at AMD.
“Nvidia cares deeply about ensuring that OpenCL developers have the tools they need to easily develop and deploy mainstream applications on more than 150 million Nvidia OpenCL 1.0-capable GPUs,” said Sanford Russell, general manager, GPU Computing software at Nvidia.
The latest list of conforming products for OpenCL 1.0 support can be found here at this web page. So far most products are operating systems and GPUs.
OpenCL Expands Significantly But No Microsoft
With 33 key industry members OpenCL is well on its way to becoming an industry standard as significant as OpenGL–a graphics technology standardized across an array of industry segments and device platforms.
In the gaming industry key members include Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Nvidia and Apple. In terms of silicon systems makers they all the major vendors such as: AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.
Key mobile phone makers are also behind OpenCL including: Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia (not to mention Apple). And the US government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory is also a key member.
IBM has released its own OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power on AlphaWorks. The company’s Power Architecture processors are used in workstations, servers, mainframe computers and supercomputers. Additionally, IBM is a partner with Sony in Cell processors and is exploring OpenCL on Cell and BE processors as well.
For more information about the Khronos Group’s efforts with OpenCL visit them here.