New computing accelerators are rapidly emerging, and organizations need to examine time and financial considerations associated with developing performance-sensitive applications that can run on both new and existing computing platforms. Commissioned by Intel, a recent research report from J.Gold Associates, “oneAPI: Software Abstraction for a Heterogeneous Computing World,” discusses the importance of application portability, the need for enterprises to move toward a new cross-architecture model with multiple computing accelerators, and insights on oneAPI’s open approach to cross-architecture development.
“A wide array of accelerated processors is coming to market at an ever-faster pace and more application workloads can take advantage of their capabilities, but only if the applications are built with a model that assures maximum compatibility and flexibility. A cross-architecture model like oneAPI goes a long way to assuring developers of performance-sensitive applications that portability across new and emerging acceleration platforms can take place without having to totally rewrite the app.” – Jack Gold, J.Gold Associates
The report lays out the case for enterprises and developers to transition to oneAPI by presenting an example of a typical application development process and the subsequent migration of the developed application for use with a new hardware accelerator. The report also details why the inevitable move toward specialized accelerators makes now the right time for unified programming, and analyzes the cost and time benefits that can be realized by writing applications that can target multiple compute devices while avoiding architecture and vendor lock-in.
Key points of the study include:
- Both data-centric workloads and the architectures that can best process them continue to diversify.
- Moving to a cross-architecture model for application development can save an organization a significant amount of time and money each time a typical performance-sensitive application is moved to a new computing platform – over five months and $300,000 in the example used in the report.
- The oneAPI initiative is an open, cross-industry approach to the next generation of application creation that helps deliver both increased developer productivity and uncompromised application performance.
The emergence of heterogenous computing through the availability of diverse and evolving hardware accelerators presents organizations with the opportunity to save time and money when porting existing code by using a unified programming model. oneAPI is a cross-industry, open, standards-based, unified programming model that delivers a common developer experience across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and specialized accelerators. The open oneAPI specification builds upon industry standards and existing developer programming models to enable a diverse set of hardware across multiple architectures and vendors. The oneAPI industry initiative encourages collaboration on the oneAPI specification and compatible oneAPI implementations across the ecosystem. More information on the oneAPI industry initiative can be found here.