AMD intros faculty development program for OpenCL

NEW DELHI, INDIA: AMD India recently launched the first Faculty Development Program for OpenCL available in India.

The three-day workshop was attended by faculty members from various Engineering and Technology universities and colleges in partnership with Coimbatore Institute of Technology (CIT), Coimbatore, India.

Also read: AMD Acceleware to offer OpenCL education

According to the release, the program is targeted towards the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard, which is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of Central Processing Units (CPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and other processors.

Faculty members were trained in the subject using AMD’s University Kit, a set of materials that can be leveraged by any Indian university to assist them in teaching a semester course in OpenCL programming.

Also read: OpenCL 1.1 to accelerate parallel programming

The release further added that, this effort underscores AMD’s commitment to the educational community, which includes a number of research initiatives, created to equip the next generation of software developers and programmers with the knowledge needed to lead the era of heterogeneous computing.

OpenCL

OpenCL, the only non-proprietary, royalty-free industry standard available today for true heterogeneous computing, helps developers to harness the full compute power of both the CPU and GPU to create innovative applications for vivid computing experiences.

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Jay Hiremath, director, AMD Platform and Software Engineering said, "We have a significant number of programmers and developers working at our R&D facilities in Hyderabad and Bangalore. With the advent of parallel computing, there is a need for creating a rich ecosystem of developers and programmers in the country, prepared for a changing global marketplace."

“This Faculty Development Program will facilitate exactly that, where large scale adoption of OpenCL will help leverage all the compute power at our disposal, be it in the CPU, GPU or APU,” Hiremath added. 

Dr.S.R.K.Prasad, correspondent, CIT reiterates, "CIT is on the road to working in many frontier technologies in various fields of engineering. OpenCL will be the future platform to depict and understand complex real life engineering applications, especially in the field of computer simulation."

"I think engineering and technology universities, across the country should incorporate OpenCL into their curriculum right from the undergraduate level up to the doctoral level," he added.