We’ve been following Intel’s oneAPI—an artificial intelligence development platform designed to abstract hardware away from the task of developing AI code—with great interest since its launch last November. This week, Intel and the Heidelberg University Computing Center (URZ) announced a new Academic Center of Excellence (CoE) which will support and conduct research on the oneAPI platform.
The new collaboration immediately followed Intel’s own announcement of the oneAPI specification reaching 1.0 status. The 1.0 milestone is significant, since it enables collaborators to focus on adapting hardware to a standard, fixed implementation, worrying about the specification itself shifting rapidly beneath their feet.
URZ’s own announcement of the oneAPI Center of Excellence begins by reiterating the raison d’etre of oneAPI itself: