SYCLOPS: Scaling extreme analytics with Cross-architecture acceleration based on Open Standards

The wide-spread adoption of AI and analytics has resulted in a rapidly expanding market for novel hardware accelerators that can provide energy-efficient scaling of training and inference tasks at both the cloud and edge. Unfortunately, all popular solutions AI acceleration solutions today use proprietary, closed hardware—software stacks, leading to a monopolization of the AI acceleration market by a few large industry players.

In this talk, I will introduce the European Commission-funded Horizon Europe project SYCLOPS. The vision of SYCLOPS is to enable better solutions for AI/data mining for extremely large and diverse data by democratizing AI acceleration using open standards, and enabling a healthy, competitive, innovation-driven ecosystem for Europe and beyond. This vision relies on the convergence of two important trends in the industry: (i) the standardization and adoption of RISC-V, a free, open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), for AI and analytics acceleration, and (ii) the emergence and growth of SYCL as a cross-vendor, cross-architecture, data parallel programming model for all types of accelerators, including RISC-V.