In a partnership aiming to advance autonomous driving technology, The Autoware Foundation and Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL) have announced an alliance focused on developing an open-source software demonstration, according to a press release on July 17.
This collaboration seeks to leverage the oneAPI specification and open source for acceleration across a variety of hardware accelerators, including graphics processing units (GPUs), to demonstrate an automotive reference application. The Autoware Foundation, known for its leading open-source project Autoware and the Open AD Kit project, and UXL, which specializes in open accelerated compute and the development of the oneAPI specification under the governance of the Linux Foundation's Joint Development Foundation, are bringing together their resources and expertise in this endeavor.
The project has attracted contributions from industry leaders and companies such as Arm, Imagination Technologies, Intel and Qualcomm. The collaboration aims to illustrate the potential of UXL libraries in providing a performant and feasible path for the automotive industry to develop robust and portable software. A significant part of this initiative is to enable software portability across various hardware platforms by making Autoware software-defined and less dependent on underlying hardware, thereby facilitating the deployment of software on a diverse set of devices as demanded by automotive original equipment manufacturers and tier 1s.
The common implementation strategy will employ a generic shared baseline running on the CPU, while specific implementations may allow vendors to offer optimized solutions for different backend targets. This collaborative effort is expected to utilize components within the oneMKL library, such as LAPACK, BLAS and FFT, with a focus on demonstrating applications like Lidar point-cloud processing on Autoware's software.
Leaders from both The Autoware Foundation and UXL have expressed enthusiasm about this partnership, highlighting its potential to enhance software portability in the Open AD Kit initiative and to promote the development of hardware-agnostic and open autonomous driving software stacks. They emphasize the importance of leveraging open standards and specifications such as SYCL and oneAPI in addressing the evolving needs of the automotive industry, particularly as vehicles increasingly incorporate diverse accelerators such as CPUs, GPUs and AI processors.
