The HSA Foundation today announced at the 2013 AMD Developer Summit, “APU13”, the addition of new members spanning Fortune 500 technology giants, software innovators, high-tech silicon suppliers and the world’s most forefront research institutions. Backed by founder members, AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments (TI), the HSA Foundation is dedicated to developing open-standard architecture specifications that unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in most modern devices.

“Joining the HSA Foundation represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of developers, as well as the introduction of new server and cloud programming paradigms,” said Nandini Ramani, vice president of development, Java Platform, Oracle. “Our work with the HSA Foundation will help provide Java developers with the ability to quickly leverage GPU acceleration, and explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to allow applications to take advantage of heterogeneous compute.”

“In less than six months, more than a dozen of the industry’s elite have pledged their support to driving the HSA standard forward,” said Phil Rogers, president, HSA Foundation. “The rapid adoption of HSA and the development of the Foundation’s open ecosystem will help usher in the next era unprecedented user experiences to improving cloud-based data management, streaming, and security.”

As an independent consortium, the HSA Foundation is open to any computing industry professionals with an interest in driving the next era in computing performance and energy efficiency.  Members will assist with research, development, production, manufacture, use, and the sale of HSA and heterogeneous computing software. The latest members to join the HSA Foundation include:
• Broadcom
• Canonical Limited
• Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
• Huawei
• Industrial Technology Res. Institute
• Kishonti
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Linaro
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Oracle
• Synopsys
• TEI of Crete
• UChicago Argonne, LLC. Operator of Argonne National Laboratory
• VIA Technologies
 
Also announced today is the formation of the HSA Foundation Open Source Developer Program.  The new program will help drive greater developer productivity in heterogeneous computing by removing many of the barriers of traditional heterogeneous programming and enabling developers to focus on their algorithms and not managing system resources. Specifically, the program will focus on three key areas:
• Development of core tools, runtimes and simulators that allow developers to access HSA technologies
• Provide documentation and tools to help accelerate the development of applications on top of HSAF runtimes technologies
• Give developers a place to contribute to the development of the open source HSA tools and runtimes

Through the Open Source Developer Program, engaging the HSA Foundation and all the technologies that encompass the HSA specifications is now easier and more effective.  Parties interested in exploring and contributing to HSA can use the HSA Foundation Open Source Developer Program resources. Anyone can join the mailing lists, ask questions, contribute patches, report bugs, look at submitted patches, and use the tools.