AMD Advances Parallel Computing with OpenCL University Kit

AMD today announced the introduction of the OpenCL University Kit, a set of materials that can be leveraged by any university to assist them in teaching a semester course in OpenCL programming.

This effort underscores AMD’s commitment to the educational community, which currently includes a number of strategic research initiatives, to enable the next generation of software developers and programmers with the knowledge needed to lead the era of heterogeneous computing. OpenCL, the only non-proprietary 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.

Included in the AMD University Kit is a 13 lecture series, equipped with instructor and speaker notes, as well as code examples where necessary. An advanced understanding of OpenCL is not needed to understand the course materials; students only require a basic knowledge of C/C++ programming. A C/C++ compiler and an OpenCL implementation (such as the AMD APP SDK) are needed to complete the exercises.

OpenCL is gaining popularity in academia, with a number of universities already offering similar OpenCL courses. For more information on the university courses currently offered, please visit the OpenCL Zone here. If you offer a course that would like to add to the list, you can also do that on AMD’s site.

I think this is a great move by AMD to both help advance OpenCL with the support it needs, and reduce the Nvidia Cuda/PhysX stranglehold.  

Source: TechPowerUp