Ora­cle, Broad­com, Oak Ridge Natio­nal Labo­ra­to­ry and Hua­wei Are Among Indus­try-Lea­ding Orga­niza­ti­ons Recent­ly Joi­ning the HSA Foun­da­ti­on to Advan­ce Open Stan­dards for Hete­ro­ge­neous Com­pu­te Pro­gramming; Open Source Deve­lo­per Pro­gram Laun­ched to Dri­ve Grea­ter Deve­lo­per Pro­duc­ti­vi­ty in Hete­ro­ge­neous Computing

SAN JOSE, CA, Nov 12, 2013 — The HSA Foun­da­ti­on today announ­ced at the 2013 AMD Deve­lo­per Sum­mit, “APU13”, the addi­ti­on of new mem­bers span­ning For­tu­ne 500 tech­no­lo­gy giants, soft­ware inno­va­tors, high-tech sili­con sup­pli­ers and the world’s most fore­front rese­arch insti­tu­ti­ons. Backed by foun­der mem­bers, AMD, ARM, Ima­gi­na­ti­on Tech­no­lo­gies, Media­Tek Inc., Qual­comm, Sam­sung Elec­tro­nics and Texas Instru­ments (TI), the HSA Foun­da­ti­on is dedi­ca­ted to deve­lo­ping open-stan­dard archi­tec­tu­re spe­ci­fi­ca­ti­ons that unlock the per­for­mance and power effi­ci­en­cy of the par­al­lel com­pu­ting engi­nes found in most modern devices.

“Joi­ning the HSA Foun­da­ti­on repres­ents the next step towards brin­ging hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­ting to mil­li­ons of deve­lo­pers, as well as the intro­duc­tion of new ser­ver and cloud pro­gramming para­digms,” said Nan­di­ni Rama­ni, vice pre­si­dent of deve­lo­p­ment, Java Plat­form, Ora­cle. “Our work with the HSA Foun­da­ti­on will help pro­vi­de Java deve­lo­pers with the abili­ty to quick­ly levera­ge GPU acce­le­ra­ti­on, and explo­re how the Java Vir­tu­al Machi­ne (JVM), as well as the Java lan­guage and APIs, might be enhan­ced to allow appli­ca­ti­ons to take advan­ta­ge of hete­ro­ge­neous compute.”

“In less than six months, more than a dozen of the industry’s eli­te have pled­ged their sup­port to dri­ving the HSA stan­dard for­ward,” said Phil Rogers, pre­si­dent, HSA Foun­da­ti­on. “The rapid adop­ti­on of HSA and the deve­lo­p­ment of the Foundation’s open eco­sys­tem will help usher in the next era unpre­ce­den­ted user expe­ri­en­ces to impro­ving cloud-based data manage­ment, strea­ming, and security.”

As an inde­pen­dent con­sor­ti­um, the HSA Foun­da­ti­on is open to any com­pu­ting indus­try pro­fes­sio­nals with an inte­rest in dri­ving the next era in com­pu­ting per­for­mance and ener­gy effi­ci­en­cy. Mem­bers will assist with rese­arch, deve­lo­p­ment, pro­duc­tion, manu­fac­tu­re, use, and the sale of HSA and hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­ting soft­ware. The latest mem­bers to join the HSA Foun­da­ti­on include:

– Broad­com
— Cano­ni­cal Limited
— Elec­tro­nics and Tele­com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons Rese­arch Insti­tu­te (ETRI)
— Huawei
— Indus­tri­al Tech­no­lo­gy Res. Institute
— Kishonti
— Law­rence Liver­mo­re Natio­nal Laboratory
— Linaro
— Oak Ridge Natio­nal Laboratory
— Oracle
— Synopsys
— TEI of Crete
— UChi­ca­go Argon­ne, LLC, ope­ra­tor of Argon­ne Natio­nal Laboratory
— VIA Technologies

Also announ­ced today is the for­ma­ti­on of the HSA Foun­da­ti­on Open Source Deve­lo­per Pro­gram. The new pro­gram will help dri­ve grea­ter deve­lo­per pro­duc­ti­vi­ty in hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­ting by remo­ving many of the bar­riers of tra­di­tio­nal hete­ro­ge­neous pro­gramming and enab­ling deve­lo­pers to focus on their algo­rith­ms and not mana­ging sys­tem resour­ces. Spe­ci­fi­cal­ly, the pro­gram will focus on three key areas:

– Deve­lo­p­ment of core tools, run­times and simu­la­tors that allow
deve­lo­pers to access HSA technologies
— Pro­vi­de docu­men­ta­ti­on and tools to help acce­le­ra­te the deve­lo­p­ment of
appli­ca­ti­ons on top of HSAF run­times technologies
— Give deve­lo­pers a place to con­tri­bu­te to the deve­lo­p­ment of the open
source HSA tools and runtimes

Through the Open Source Deve­lo­per Pro­gram, enga­ging the HSA Foun­da­ti­on and all the tech­no­lo­gies that encom­pass the HSA spe­ci­fi­ca­ti­ons is now easier and more effec­ti­ve. Par­ties inte­res­ted in explo­ring and con­tri­bu­ting to HSA can use the HSA Foun­da­ti­on Open Source Deve­lo­per Pro­gram resour­ces. Anyo­ne can join the mai­ling lists, ask ques­ti­ons, con­tri­bu­te patches, report bugs, look at sub­mit­ted patches, and use the tools.

Sup­port­ing Resources

– Nan­di­ni Rama­ni APU13 Keynote
— Open­so­ur­ce Deve­lo­per Program
— Visit the HSA Foun­da­ti­on Git­Hub site to access open source code
— Like the HSA Foun­da­ti­on on Facebook
— Fol­low the HSA Foun­da­ti­on on Twitter

About The HSA Foundation

The HSA (Hete­ro­ge­neous Sys­tem Archi­tec­tu­re) Foun­da­ti­on is a not-for-pro­fit con­sor­ti­um of SoC IP ven­dors, OEMs, aca­de­mia, SoC ven­dors, OSVs and ISVs who­se chal­len­ging the nor­mal of how who­le sys­tem archi­tec­tu­re is struc­tu­red for com­bing CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and other acce­le­ra­tors to bring about for­ward pro­gress in computing’s foun­da­ti­on to make it dra­ma­ti­cal­ly easier to pro­gram hete­ro­ge­neous par­al­lel devices. HSA Foun­da­ti­on is dri­ving this via Royal­ty Free Spe­ci­fi­ca­ti­ons and open source soft­ware: HSA run­times and low level com­pi­la­ti­on tools based on open source tech­no­lo­gies like LLVM and GCC.

HSA Foun­da­ti­on mem­bers are buil­ding a hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­te soft­ware eco­sys­tem which is roo­ted on open royal­ty free indus­try stan­dards. We are loo­king to bring about appli­ca­ti­ons that blend sca­lar pro­ces­sing on the CPU, par­al­lel pro­ces­sing on the GPU, and opti­mi­zed pro­ces­sing of DSP via high band­width shared memo­ry access with grea­ter appli­ca­ti­on per­for­mance at low power con­sump­ti­on. HSA Foun­da­ti­on is defi­ning key inter­faces and for par­al­lel com­pu­ta­ti­on uti­li­zing CPU, GPU, DSPs and other pro­gramma­ble and fixed func­tion devices, which will sup­port a diver­se set of high-level pro­gramming lan­guages crea­ting the next foun­da­ti­on in gene­ral pur­po­se com­pu­ting. Most important­ly we are dri­ving to bring grea­ter deve­lo­per pro­duc­ti­vi­ty to hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­ting by remo­ving many of the bar­riers of tra­di­tio­nal hete­ro­ge­neous pro­g­ra­ming so they can focus on their algo­rith­ms and not mana­ging sys­tem resour­ces. One of the key attri­bu­tes of Cache Coher­ent Shared Vir­tu­al Memo­ry (“CC-SVM”) is begin loo­king at lar­ger data­set then tra­di­tio­nal­ly sup­port­ed by today co-pro­ces­sor devices with fixed memo­ry pools. For more infor­ma­ti­on, visit www.hsafoundation.com.