Petapath joins Khronos Group

PRESS RELEASE

2 March 2009

Petapath, a supplier of heterogeneous computing solutions in the high-
performance computing sector, has joined the Khronos group, an industry
consortium aimed at creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration
of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms
and devices.

The company has joined Khronos' working group for OpenCL - the first open,
royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern
processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.
OpenCL greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of
applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to
scientific and medical software.

"Petapath is actively promoting OpenCL as the preferred programming environment
because it is genuinely open to all vendors and supported across all operating
systems," says Dairsie Latimer, co-founder and CTO of Petapath. "By creating an
efficient, close-to-the-metal programming interface, OpenCL is the foundation
layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools,
middleware and applications."

OpenCL consists of an application programme interface (API) for coordinating
parallel computation across heterogeneous processors and a cross-platform kernel
programming language with a well-specified computation environment.

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards All Khronos
members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications,
are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able
to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge platforms and applications
through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

"OpenCL is the non-proprietary standard that many developers and independent
software vendors have been waiting for," says Latimer. "It addresses both the
need to be hardware vendor-independent and to potentially have a single source
base for using both CPUs and GPUs in a heterogeneous system."

Petapath's expertise and technology can dramatically increase computer
performance with only modest increases in power dissipation. This brings
enormous benefits to users of HPC, be they in academia or industry. Systems used
in enterprise computing often use only a fraction of their available computing
capacity. Petapath's technology will give customers access to this unexploited
capacity, delivery increased computer performance with only a moderate increase
in power usage.

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About Petapath
Petapath is a supplier of heterogeneous computing solutions in the high-
performance computing sector. Its expertise and technology dramatically
increases computing performance with only a moderate increase in power
dissipation. Petapath's software technology can be applied to any application
using high-performance computing, from banking and entertainment, to scientific
and mathematical modelling. Petapath's technology is a cost-effective, energy-
efficient way of increasing computer performance into the petaflop/s regime.
www.petapath.com


Press contact:
Michal Harasimiuk
michal@petapath.com
+44(0)117 911 7544
+44(0)778 718 5248