At the Game Developers Conference 2014, both Codeplay Ltd. and AiGameDev.com KG gave a presentation about applying OpenCL and SYCL to creating massively parallel AI. This joint talk by Alex Champandard and Andrew Richards was featured on the first day of the AI Summit, in front of a room of approx. 300 developers.

This was the first unofficial unveiling of SYCL to the general public, and the presentation also covered topics such as converting or implementing algorithms for GPGPUs, designing architectures for heterogeneous computing, key concepts of the OpenCL model, as well as hardware execution patterns.

Feedback from the talk was very positive, both in the reviews and in personal comments after the session.

“Very inspirational! Will be trying some Opencl stuff out tonight as a result.”

“I thoroughly enjoyed this session, and appreciated how the presenters were able to walk through some real world examples of how things could and could not benefit from massive parallelism in the world of AI, as well as the detailed analysis of why these tools are important and how they relate back to the current and near future hardware landscape.”

“Excellent overview on hardware specific considerations a developer should make when designing kernel functions for GPUs. Thanks for letting us in on SYCL early!”

“Amazing session. I particularly appreciated the level of honesty – they were clearly excited about this technology, but they also didn’t try to sugar coat its challenges.”