What'S New In Sycl 1.2.1 And How To Explore The Features

On the 17th of November 2017, Khronos ratified the latest SYCL 1.2.1 specification. Although only one minor version increase, the work on the new specification represents two and half years of effort from the SYCL group. The group spent time receiving feedback from the public specifications and working closely with C++ developers to devise the best way to approach the challenges of heterogeneous programming with real-world applications like Eigen or TensorFlow. SYCL 1.2.1 improves on the previous SYCL 1.2 specification by adding a number of mini-features in the form of extensions to the C++ API that simplify programming and expose more capabilities from the underlying OpenCL 1.2 interface, such as explicit copy functionality; alongside various improvements on the interface including better support for standard C++ allocators or extensions capabilities. Although SYCL 1.2.1 is still based on C++11, the new mini-features facilitate the usage of modern C++ library features, like Parallel STL. In this presentation, we introduce the new SYCL 1.2.1 specification, explain the different updates and changes to the APIs and illustrate how to take advantage of them by showing some examples. We will also present the current status of the implementation of SYCL 1.2.1 for ComputeCpp, an implementation of the standard, and how to use the new features and API changes. To conclude we will provide some hints on the future direction of the SYCL and C++ standards by looking at different on-going proposals like executors or Parallel STL