PRESS RELEASE 2 March 2009 Petapath joins Khronos Group Start-up company Petapath has joined an industry consortium aimed at creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing. 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. - END – 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