OpenCL SDK early released by Adapteva

Adapteva, a privately-held semiconductor technology start up, today announced that it is providing an early access release of an OpenCL SDK for the Epiphany multicore architecture. The OpenCL implementation was completed together with Brown Deer Technology, leading innovator in open-source heterogeneous computing.

OpenCLTM is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming that is now reaching widespread adoption in servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) provides a portable API for accessing the compute capabilities of a platform, accelerating performance in a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. With the OpenCL SDK, Epiphany programmers will be able to easily accelerate compute intensive tasks across an arbitrary number of cores on Epiphany based accelerator solutions.

“Adapteva’s Epiphany multicore architecture scales to 1000’s of cores on a single chip. Such massive parallelism requires a battle tested programming model that scales well. We chose OpenCL because it is an open standard with broad industry support and because it fits perfectly with our approach to heterogeneous computing”, said Andreas Olofsson, CEO at Adapteva. “We were very fortunate to be able to leverage the COPRTHR OpenCL implementation developed by Brown Deer Technology for ARM and x86 processors. The speed by which BDT ported its COPRTHR implementation to the Epiphany architecture and the quality of the results were simply outstanding and speaks volumes about the level of innovation and expertise at BDT and the maturity and flexibility of the Epiphany architecture.”

“Adapteva has delivered an architecture that supports massive on-chip parallelism with impressive power efficiency. OpenCL provides the perfect foundation for such a processor," said Dr. David Richie, President at Brown Deer Technology. "We leveraged this API in an SDK that provides programmers with a clear path for code development. Programmers will find their parallel algorithms mapping naturally to the Epiphany architecture. The chip is designed for massively parallel algorithms. Extracting performance from the architecture becomes relatively easy as a result of this design.”

Target Markets and Availability

The Epiphany OpenCL SDK is currently in Beta release and available to early access partners.
Coding examples and white papers will be published on Adapteva’s corporate site in the coming month.

Mashery Accelerates API Success With Open Source Developer Tools

I/O Wraps and I/O Alfred Increase Access to APIs for App Development

Mashery, the leading provider of API Management technology platforms and services, today announced new additions to its successful suite of open source API Power Tools. Designed as painkillers that enable developers to create and release apps faster, Mashery's API Power Tools now include I/O Wraps, a new API client library tool. As the API equivalent of an SDK (Software Development Kit), I/O Wraps gives developers externally built open source resources native to a variety of programming languages.

Public APIs are currently experiencing record growth because they enable developers across every industry to accelerate app development. Mashery created I/O Wraps based on feedback received from its 160,000-strong developer base. Developed under open source licenses to encourage collaboration and accelerate adoption of APIs, I/O Wraps launches today with Mashery customers USA TODAY ( http://developer.usatoday.com ) and Whit.li ( http://developer.whit.li ) both offering PHP and Java SDKs created with I/O Wraps.

"APIs that are frustrating to work with often fail to attract the necessary level of developer engagement," said Delyn Simons, Vice President of Developer Platform, Mashery. "The overwhelming response to Mashery's open source I/O Docs project over the last year revealed to us that the competition for developer mindshare and talent is heating up. APIs with strong open source developer tools are more accessible and are therefore more likely to succeed."

The benefits of language-specific client libraries for API providers speak for themselves, and deliver a community benefit aligned with the principles of the open source movement. And for developers, the benefits resolve many common API integration pain points -- a clean consistent interface, the ability to execute live API calls for accelerated learning, method exploration, and testing from a single location.

After just more than a year in the market, I/O Docs, Mashery's first open source API Power Tool, has seen adoption by over 30 major API providers. In the spirit of open source development, several leaders in the online platform and tools space, including SendGrid, HubSpot, DataSift and DocuSign, have contributed code back to the project or integrated it into their API for developer use.

"Implementing I/O Docs for SendGrid has been extremely valuable to both our customers and our support team," said SendGrid API Evangelist Brandon West. "I/O Docs lets developers see exactly what they are going to get from our API without having to write a line of code, and it helps support test and debug API calls without having to use command line tools. It's a win for everyone."

Mashery also announced the availability of I/O Alfred, a developer tool for integrating API calls in the Alfred Mac tool. Mashery has created a set of Alfred app extensions that use the Rovi, Klout, Twitter and Twilio APIs to give Mac users access to useful information, such as movie data and social influence scores. I/O Wraps and I/O Alfred join existing open source developer tools offered by Mashery, including interactive API documentation, HTML5 code samples, OAuth Helpers for JavaScript and .NET, and more.