Adapteva Announces Availability of OpenCL SDK for Epiphany Multicore Architecture

An open source framework that makes massive parallelism accessible to everyone

LEXINGTON, Mass. -- August 22, 2012 --Adapteva, a privately-held semiconductor technology start up, today announced that it is providing an early access release of its OpenCL SDK for the Epiphany multicore architecture. The OpenCL implementation was completed together with Brown Deer Technology, a leading innovator in open-source heterogeneous computing.

OpenCL™ 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 was 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.

About Brown Deer Technology

Brown Deer Technology was founded in 2003 to provide products and services for high-performance and accelerated computing applications. Brown Deer Technology is a leading innovator in the use of emerging hybrid CPU/GPU computing platforms and provides open-source software to the HPC community. This investment in the development of software and best-practices is leveraged to provide unsurpassed technical support to help customers leverage the latest HPC architectures. For more information on the company, visit http://www.browndeertechnology.com.

About Adapteva

Adapteva, Inc. is a privately-held semiconductor technology company founded in 2008 and based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Adapteva has developed the world’s most energy efficient multicore microprocessor architecture, immediately boosting by an order of magnitude the number of cores that can be integrated on a single chip. Adapteva’s breakthrough architecture will have an immediate impact in a wide range of end-user products from compact mobile devices to next generation supercomputers. For more information on the company visit http://www.adapteva.com.