Code Together

Despite its tough challenges, our global pandemic has opened the door to big opportunities, ushering in incredible innovation in visual effects and the discovery of amazing talent regardless of location. Real-time technology and tools, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the rise of volume rendering, in conjunction with geometric rendering, are transforming storytelling. Collaboration on open technologies through the Academy Software Foundation is accelerating and democratizing development. Rob Bredow, SVP and Chief Creative Officer at Industrial Light & Magic, and Jim Jeffers, Senior Principal Engineer and Senior Director of Intel’s Advanced Rendering and Visualization team, cover these topics and more on this episode.

Guests:

• Rob Bredow, SVP and Chief Creative Officer, Industrial Light & Magic

To learn more:

Dr. Ruymán Reyes Castro, CTO at Codeplay Software, and Kevin Harms, Senior Software Developer at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, talk about their collaboration with the National Energy for Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley Lab to enhance the LLVM-based DPC++ open source compiler, based on the SYCL standard, to support Nvidia GPUs. They discuss the key role of open communities in furthering innovation, building on top of the modern C++ standard to support accelerators and advanced hardware, fostering a strong ecosystem around SYCL and DPC++, the merits of the latest features in the SYCL 2020 standard, and more.

Guests:

To learn more:

Epistasis detection holds great promise for the prevention and treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and breast cancer. INESC-ID researchers Aleksander Ilic and Rafael Torres Campos are collaborating with other researchers and developers across Portugal through the HiPErBio Project to advance the precision and efficiency of epistasis detection, using oneAPI DevCloud, Intel CPUs and Intel GPUs, such as the Intel® Iris® Xe MAX. Rafael shares his experiences in porting bioinformatics applications from OpenCL to DPC++ to target multiple hardware architectures, the speedups he achieved and some surprises along the way.

Guests:

To learn more:

“It’s really exciting to see all the sorts of things that are becoming smart in our daily lives,” remarks John Melonakos, CEO & co-founder of ArrayFire. In this episode, John talks about the challenges he sees as heavy computational workloads move closer to the edge, and how important data parallelism and open standards are in accelerating these workloads for businesses across defense, healthcare, energy, entertainment and more. John and Intel engineer James Reinders also share their passion in arming the next generation of developers with powerful tools to build the next big thing.

To learn more:

Guests:

We explore the critical role of visualization and visual analytics in disaster management and medical research with Paul Navrátil, Director of Visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and Jim Jeffers, Sr. Principal Engineer and Sr. Director of Advanced Rendering and Visualization at Intel. Paul reveals TACC’s approach to recent weather crises, as well as their partnership with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in hurricane forecasting. He also talks about their collaboration with the Open Science community in the national HPC mobilization effort to fight COVID-19. Jim unpacks the complexities of in-situ analysis, ray tracing and line-of-sight physics. And they jam about the SOLAR Ray Tracing Consortium, Khronos Group ANARI Working Group and more.

To learn more:

Guests:

In this second episode about GROMACS, one of the world’s most widely used open source molecular dynamics (MD) applications, we explore the quest to simplify portable, performant programming with Erik Lindahl, Biophysics Professor at Stockholm University & KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Roland Schulz, Parallel Software Engineer at Intel. Andrey Alekseenko, Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SciLifeLab, shares his experiences porting GROMACS across hardware architectures. And our guests talk about Khronos SYCL’s rapid growth and vibrant, thriving community.

Guests:

To learn more:

Open standards underpin the future of heterogeneous programming, and as Intel Principal Engineer Jeff Hammond points out, SYCL has proven in many ways that “standards don’t cost you a thing and you get portability.” A modern C++ language, SYCL has demonstrated amazing growth and now boasts four implementations—ComputeCpp, triSYCL, hipSYCL and DPC++. hipSYCL Creator Aksel Alpay explains some of the differences between these implementations, and how hipSYCL is evolving to incorporate DPC++ features contributed to the SYCL 2020 specification, including unified shared memory (USM), reductions, group algorithms and subgroups. The two also dive into a discussion of buffers and accessors, and Aksel debunks a few myths around hipSYCL.

Guests:

To learn more:

Increased processing power, massive amounts of data, and the development of more advanced algorithms have brought deep learning to the forefront, and TensorFlow has emerged as one of the world’s most popular machine learning frameworks. Penporn Koanantakool, Google Senior Software Engineer, and Ramesh, Intel Principal Engineer, share how their teams are collaborating to optimize TensorFlow for the latest Intel technologies using oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library (oneDNN). The result: remarkable performance gains that will benefit applications spanning natural language processing, image and object recognition, autonomous vehicles, fraud detection, medical diagnosis and treatment, and much more. Intel-optimized TensorFlow is now made available through Intel AI Analytics Toolkit and is being used within Google Cloud Platform and a Google Health project.

To learn more:

Andrew Lumsdaine, Chief Scientist at Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, shares his journey in parallelism, from the HPC community’s early skepticism of and eventual move to C++ to build large systems, to his pursuit to develop a series of C++ libraries to strike at the contradiction between abstraction and performance, to today’s reality that parallelism and heterogeneity are essential for achieving performance. Together, Andrew and Mike Voss, Principal Engineer at Intel, underscore the value of open standards and high-quality implementations of open standards—specifically, the oneAPI specification and Intel oneAPI toolkits, respectively—and provide listeners with ways to get involved in helping shape ISO C++, Khronos SYCL, DPC++ and oneAPI.

Guests:

To learn more:

Who better to have a spicy discussion with about #OpenMP than Tim Mattson and Bronis de Supinski? These two have truly lived at the forefront of the amazing, decades-long OpenMP journey, from its inception to its preeminence as a foundational tool for HPC application programmers. Listen to what’s coming in 5.1 and beyond, how the C++ ecosystem is evolving, why Python in HPC, and have fun as these two razz each other.

Guests:

Tim Mattson, Senior Principal Engineer, and Manager, Programming Systems Research Group, Intel

To learn more: