Why Developers Should Let oneAPI ‘Dramatically Simplify’ Their Work
Summary
The ambition of oneAPI is to take on both these problems with one big swing: give developers choice when it comes to hardware and make it easier to achieve high-performance code. Intel, Petersen says, has “the unique viewpoint that we are allowing heterogeneous hardware into the mix.” In contrast with proprietary solutions — particularly the CUDA programming model, which targets Nvidia GPUs — oneAPI is built on a foundation of openness that enables maximum choice and cements standards into place. In this case, “We dramatically simplify the developer’s cost of how much they need to learn and how many different ecosystems they need to maintain in order to do their job.” Petersen describes oneAPI as “a performance-oriented programming system,” as opposed to something like JavaScript or Python “where it’s all about productivity, and performance is secondary.” The team is “creating an open ecosystem that allows that kind of developer productivity for high-performance software.” “We strive to be as close to the hardware as we can get while still being able to be portable and supporting multiple kinds of hardware,” he explains. We’re constantly fighting to keep our code paths as short as possible.” So far, so good: “We can go head-to-head with the same piece of hardware and show users that they’re not losing anything by switching to an open solution,” Petersen says. The result of this ambitious plan — to offer a competitive and comprehensive set of features, invent new capabilities and do so across an expanding array of hardware configurations — is that “oneAPI is huge,” Petersen confirms.
