Date: 16/06/2011

AMD OpenCL Coding Competition for software developers

AMD has announced the AMD OpenCL Coding Competition, being run by software development leader TopCoder. This contest is intended to encourage the creation of applications that take advantage of OpenCL and the AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) architecture. The openCL Coding Competition is open to software developers with great ideas, and up to $50,000 in prizes will be awarded to winning submissions.

"We're at an inflection point in the computing industry with evolving chip architectures and the shift to common programming interfaces and industry standards, which enable developers to enable amazing new experiences," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program. "The OpenCL Coding Competition is just the beginning of a new wave of application development by the software community as they embrace heterogeneous computing across multiple platforms."

Developers and students who choose to participate will be asked to submit an abstract that outlines how they plan to use the latest generation AMD APP software development kit (SDK) with OpenCL support to create an accelerated application for the AMD Fusion APU platforms.

Contestants can choose to create an application in any category including, but not limited to, the following:
Video Processing
Image Processing
Security
Human Computer Interface
Data Mining
Gaming
Physics processing
Social Networking / Communication
Other

"We see APU architecture continuing to be widely adopted for new computing designs, and believe that developers will want to build and optimize their applications around the high performance achieved with these new hardware platforms," said Matt Murphy, TopCoder platform manager. "This technology shift signifies a sizeable opportunity for developers around the world who want to be early to embrace a new era of heterogeneous computing."

In addition to the SDK, contestants will need the latest AMD Catalyst drivers that include the OpenCL runtime compiler. Released in May 2011, the latest AMD Catalyst drivers for Windows and Linux also bring new features, including expanded support for multi-display environments through AMD Eyefinity technology, which developers can leverage to create even more immersive experiences for end users.