Version 1.7 of the Julia programming language implementation is now available, the open-source high-performance language that is general purpose but especially popular for computational science and numerical analysis.

The Julia programming language is increasingly used for numerical computing/analysis use-cases and by all accounts remains on a terrific upward trajectory. Julia 1.7 is the latest feature release adding on new features and functionality.

With Julia 1.7 is a new random number generator (RNG), new threading capabilities, automatic package installation

For years LLVM has been working on a massive relicensing of its code-base but that effort is still ongoing as they are still trying to track down some past contributors to collect their sign-offs on the change.

LLVM is seeking help in trying to track down some past individual contributors and organizations so they can proceed with their relicensing of the massive code-base. As a reminder, they are working to move from the University of Illinois / NCSA Open-Source Library (similar to the MIT/X11

AMD released AOMP 14.0 during SC21 week as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler providing OpenMP GPU offload support for Radeon graphics processors.

AOMP 14.0 was released this morning as the newest version of this patched-up version of LLVM/Clang that gets OpenMP GPU offload into good shape with Radeon GPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators.

With AOMP 14.0, they have switched to using a new code branch for their LLVM/Clang base. They have switched over

The Lightweight Java Game Library "LWJGL" has seen its first release in more than two years for this library that provides bindings for a number of different native APIs. With not seeing a release since before the pandemic, there is a lot in store with today's LWJGL 3.3 release.

LWJGL 3.3 has many changes with the last v3.2 point release being back in September 2019 or the introduction of v3.2.0 since July 2018. There

Intel, Amazon AWS, IBM, Qualcomm, and UIUC researchers have been collaborating over a proposed "Tensor LLVM Extensions" (TLX) to make this open-source compiler infrastructure more suitable for targeting AI accelerators and other emerging classes of hardware.

The proposed Tensor LLVM Extensions would make the widely-used LLVM compiler stack able to better deal with tensor cores and similar hardware for today's increasing AI/ML workloads and related fields. LLVM is already the dominant player when it comes to supporting CPUs and often GPUs while

Oracle has published its latest quarterly update to GraalVM, the open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other execution modes and programming languages from Python to R to Ruby.

Given last month's release of Java 17 / OpenJDK 17 , GraalVM 21.3 has added Java 17 support. Plus there are many other improvements to its various language front-ends and other components. Some of the GraalVM 21.3 highlights include:

- Java 17 support with GraalVM builds

Last Friday night we spotted OpenCL 3.0.9 with several new extensions included . Today The Khronos Group is formally announcing these latest OpenCL additions focused on Vulkan interoperability as well as neural network inferencing.

These new extensions for OpenCL 3.0 include an integer dot product extension for neural network inferencing (cl_khr_integer_dot_product) with a focus on 8-bit integer support.

Improving the cross-API interoperability between OpenCL and Vulkan meanwhile is the inclusion now of semaphore and external memory sharing extensions

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE is back to hacking on SALSA, the "small ALSA" library that he started a decade ago but hadn't seen a new release in six years or any code activity for the past four years... until this week.

SALSA is a lightweight ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) library intended for embedded-type systems. The SALSA documentation sums it up as:

SALSA-Lib is a small, light-weight, hot and spicy version of the ALSA library