This week marks the launch of the the AMD OpenCL Coding Competition, being run by competitive software development community TopCoder. The contest is intended to encourage the creation of applications that take advantage of the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) open and royalty-free programming standard — as well as the AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) architecture.
"We're at an inflection point in the computing industry with evolving chip architectures and the shift to common programming interfaces and industry standards," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program.
"The OpenCL Coding Competition is just the beginning of a new wave of application development by the software community as they embrace heterogeneous computing across multiple platforms," he added.
AMD says it has positioned its Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) technology (formerly known as ATI Stream) as a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that support OpenCL and enable highly parallel compute-capable GPUs to work in concert with a system's CPU — this (according to AMD) will accelerate applications beyond traditional x86 graphics and video processing.
Developers and students who choose to participate will be asked to submit an abstract that outlines how they plan to use the latest generation AMD APP Software Development Kit (SDK) with OpenCL support to create an accelerated application for the AMD Fusion APU platforms.
Contestants can choose to create an application in any category including, but not limited to, the following: Video Processing, Image Processing, Security, Human Computer Interfaces, Data Mining, Gaming, Physics processing and Social Networking/Communication.
"We see APU architecture continuing to be widely adopted for new computing designs and believe that developers will want to build and optimize their applications around the high performance achieved with these new hardware platforms," said Matt Murphy, TopCoder platform manager. "This technology shift signifies a sizable opportunity for developers around the world who want to be early to embrace a new era of heterogeneous computing."
