Khronos To Explore New High Level API For Remote Offloading

The Khronos Group, the industry consortium responsible for OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and other industry standard APIs has formed an exploratory group to evaluate the possibility of a high-level remote offloading API. The next API out of The Khronos Group could be one for remote offloading. The potential API would be a high-level, protocol-agnostic interface for remote offloading to cloud and edge infrastructure. Given the power and performance constraints of hardware today from smart glasses to VR headsets and drones, a industry-standard remote offloading API is being evaluated. Khronos noted in today's announcement of forming this exploratory group: "Resource-constrained devices such as advanced smart glasses, VR headsets, and drones are limited by battery life, heat, and form factor. Offloading computing tasks to cloud and edge infrastructure can help overcome these limitations, but today each offloading solution ties applications to its own connectivity layer. Developers must rewrite applications for proprietary frameworks, manage multiple real-time network protocols, and acquire specialized networking expertise, so an application built for one network or deployment cannot easily move to another. Additionally, many offloading solutions operate as over-the-top services, which run above the network without coordinating with it and so cannot fully leverage modern network capabilities. ... The Exploratory Forum will assess the need for high-level APIs that hide the underlying complexity of connectivity and transport from applications. Any resulting APIs would be designed to remain independent of specific protocols, hardware platforms, physical layers, and deployment models. The APIs would also complement the broader Khronos API ecosystem and relevant connectivity and network standards." We'll see what comes of this new possible Khronos API.