The Khronos Group, an open consortium of companies creating advanced acceleration interoperability standards, has announced a call for participation in a new exploratory forum. The forum aims to examine the need for an API that leverages the widely adopted SYCL standard for safety-critical industries such as automotive, avionics, medical, and industrial markets.

The new SYCL SC Exploratory Forum is expected to meet online over a period of several months starting on April 4, 2022. The forum is open to all at no cost, including non-Khronos members. Industry leaders such as Codeplay and CoreAVI are spearheading the exploratory forum.

All participants will be able to discuss use cases and requirements for a unified parallel programming interface for C++ to accelerate market growth. This API would be designed to reduce development and certification costs in safety-critical markets where using the SYCL higher-level programming model could improve programming productivity. If the Exploratory Forum reaches a significant consensus, then Khronos will work to initiate a formal Working Group to develop SYCL SC specifications.

SYCL SC would also complement the recently released Khronos Vulkan SC specification for lower-level access to GPU acceleration for advanced graphics and compute applications.

The forum is open to all proposals and relevant topics but will not discuss detailed technical design contributions to protect participants’ intellectual property (IP).