IWOCL 2017 OpenCL Wraps Up, OpenCL-V For Vulkan Makes Waves

The annual International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) conference has concluded this week in Toronto. Slides and other materials from this leading OpenCL conference are now available.

The big news of the week was the release of OpenCL 2.2 and the open-sourcing of the OpenCL CTS. As mentioned in that article, they also briefly mentioned the possibility of OpenCL and Vulkan merging in the future with there being some overlap due to both APIs basing on the SPIR-V intermediate representation and Vulkan already exposing some compute capabilities.

Neil Trevett of Khronos delivered a state of OpenCL talk. In there he discussed requirements for "OpenCL Next" and mentions how Vulkan covers most of their requirements already from SPIR-V ingestion, low-level explicit API, wide adoption, proper tooling, low-latency multi-threaded dispatch, and more. What Vulkan lacks though from the OpenCL perspective are OpenCL 2.x-class compute capabilities and support for diverse processor types.

Trevett referred to it as "OpenCL-V" for OpenCL and Vulkan conference. But for any convergence to happen, more devices like FPGAs and DSPs would need to gain Vulkan support, albeit making the Vulkan graphics support optional. However, a lot of this is still up in the air and will depend upon Khronos members and working groups to figure out the SPIR-V path forward in the months ahead.

Neil's presentation slides can be found here.

There are also various other OpenCL slides from IWOCL 2017 that can be viewed via the conference site. This is also where the new "Coriander" project was talked about for letting CUDA run over OpenCL, as covered earlier this morning on Phoronix.