The Khronos Group was at SC17 this year with booth talks on OpenCL and SYCL from Khronos members Codeplay and Xilinx. The presentations slides and videos of all the booth talks are now available on the Khronos SC17 event page.

The Khronos Group was at SIGGRAPH Asia this year with talks from several Khronos members including NVIDIA and Unity, as well as a talk from the Khronos Melbourne Chapter Leader. Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, gave an overview of the Khronos ecosystem. If you are interested in learning more about Khronos standards for 3D, VR, AR and Neural Networks, be sure to take a few minutes to read Neil’s presentation.

The best paper award among all papers presented at the ICCE Asia 2017 conference, went to the paper titled “Novel OpenVX Implementation for Heterogeneous Multi-Core Systems” (PDF), by Kedar Chitnis, Jesse Villarreal, Jr, Brijesh Jadav, Mihir N Mody, Lucas Weaver, Victor Cheng, Kumar Desappan, Anshu Jain and Pramod Swami.

Khronos held an OpenXR panel at the 2017 VRDC session (GDC) with developers Yuval Boger, Joe Ludwig, Kaye Mason, Paul Pedriana and Nick Whiting. The panel provided new updates on the goals, content and status of the effort to create a widely accepted VR API for developers called OpenXR. Learn more about OpenXR or watch the video on Youtube.

The Khronos London Chapter is holding a Christmas Extravaganza with a great line up of speakers and lots of door prizes. Speakers included from Away3D, ARM, KDAB, Unity and Intel. Food and drink will be served. Space is limited to 60 people and the event is already half full. Register today!

The Khronos Group Vulkan API v1.0.66 has been published on Github. This latest update includes three new extensions: VK_EXT_external_memory_host, VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf and VK_EXT_queue_family_foreign. Several bugs published in the public Github issues tracker have been resolved as well as some internal issues.

Codeplay has set out its intention to lead the development of guidelines to ensure that standards like OpenCL and SYCL meet the strict safety requirements for a range of industries by leading the Khronos SCAP. Illya Rudkin, Principal Software Engineer at Codeplay, is now leading the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Panel and continues the work done by Erik Noreke to establish the panel. Erik was a long time member of Khronos and well respected for his leadership in numerous working groups. On his appointment Illya said “My role is to continue the work by Erik and grow the participation of both Khronos members and external safety experts within the group. I also hope to enable the group to bring current and new open standards into the safety domain. The demand for safety critical software is growing and we have to ensure adopters of our standards can implement complex systems, often involving multiple layers, as efficiently possible with minimal concerns to safety cases.” Learn more about the goals that Illya has for The Safety Critical Advisory Panel. Please contact Khronos if you would like more information about becoming a member, or joining and advisory panel.

The Khronos Group announces an updated Adopters Program for OpenVX, the open, cross-platform, royalty-free standard for computer vision and inferencing acceleration. The updated OpenVX Adopters Program includes a new version of the full conformance tests for the latest iteration of the standard, OpenVX 1.2, and the process by which Adopters can run those tests and submit the results for working group review. Once these tests are successfully passed, Adopters are enabled to label their product as OpenVX conformant, use a royalty-free trademark license for the OpenVX name and logo in association with their implementation, gain protection from the Khronos IP framework and enjoy marketing promotion from the Khronos Group.

The Khronos Group is about to release a new standard method of moving trained neural networks among frameworks, and between frameworks and inference engines. The new standard is the Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF™); it has been in design for over a year and will be available to the public by the end of 2017. Learn more about NNEF and the upcoming released in the Khronos blog post.

Michael Wong from Codeplay Software and Hal Finkel from Argonne National Library have opened up the ‘Distributed and Heterogeneous Programming in C++ for HPC’ BOF to questions from the internet. If you have a related question you would like to ask, please post it here.

The Khronos Group has reached a cooperative agreement with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), part of the Chinese National Research and Development Program. Under this agreement, CAICT and Khronos will work together to encourage and enable local Chinese companies to adopt Khronos international standards and benefit from becoming officially conformant.

Supercomputing is underway in Denver, Colorado! The 30th annual conference is this week from November 13 through 16, and explores high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. Khronos will be at the show (Booth #394) to demonstrate how Khronos standards, especially SYCL, are playing their parts in HPC today. In addition to in-booth demos and presentations from Khronos members Codeplay and Xilinx, Khronos is giving away HPC t-shirts as well as SYCL and OpenCL stickers and reference guides at the booth.

Intel has announced the availability of a new Graphics driver, namely version 23.20.16.4849, which adds support for Microsoft Windows 10 Fall Creators update features. This update also resolves the intermittent crashes/hangs encountered in DOTA 2 (Vulkan version), enhances memory usage in OpenCL applications.

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.0.65. As well LunarG has released their SDK to match. The following new extensions were added: VK_AMD_shader_image_load_store_lod; VK_AMD_shader_info; VK_EXT_global_priority as well as Updates to loader, layers, and documents.

The Khronos Milano Chapter is thrilled to renew the collaboration with Microsoft Italia, organizing the Fall Edition of Milan’s most popular event showing the new frontiers for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality technologies. On November 14, VR enthusiasts, advocates, creators, users and consumers will have the chance to experience a unique blend of networking, demonstrations of cutting edge technology and presentations by leading VR experts. Be sure to checkout the complete lineup of upcoming Chapter events.