Urban Galaxy Online is a MMORPG built entirely on HTML5 technologies. Its graphics are powered by the WebGL renderer of the popular three.js engine. The game was built by a small team of 3 developers during the last 5 years, betting on WebGL while the standard was still shaping up and browser support was partial. Now the game is fully supported on all major desktop browsers, with experimental support for WebGL enabled mobile Chrome and mobile Safari.

Rightware launched Basemark ES 3.0, a new benchmarking software that enables professional and objective performance comparisons of mobile devices that feature the new OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics API. This API can be found in the latest popular Android and iOS smartphones and tablets and it enables unprecedented graphical fidelity in graphically rich apps such as games and navigation.

There were a few significant news announcements made at SC14 this week around OpenCL. Here are a few of the more significant ones:

• Xilinx Announces SDAccel Dev Environment for C, C++ & OpenCL
• CL2QCD – Lattice QCD based on OpenCL
• AMD got first on the Green500. 2 TFLOPS DGEMM. FirePro S9150, of course powered by OpenCL
• OpenCL at Seoul National University: SnuCL cluster manager.
• SNUCL - An OpenCL Framework for Heterogeneous Clusters

You can find photos and more links on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

OpenCL was featured in the 2014 HPCwire 5 Editors’ choice awards for new products or technologies to watch. The awards were announced at this year’s Supercomputing 2014 held in New Orleans.

An introduction to those most noteworthy of WebGL enablers—Babylon.js and Three.js wherein we shall endeavour to render a simple electronic Yule Tide scene for each. In keeping with the seasonal theme there will be door prizes. The last WebGL meetup was a great success, and we look forward to see you on December 16th for this meetup.

Update: The DIYVR Kickstarter projected reached its goal in just 4 days!

If you don’t know what DIYVR is, hop over to this fast moving WebGL related Kickstarter and see what all the fuss is about. In short, DIYVR is open, web-based software development tools for Virtual Reality. There are two other WebGL related kickstarters now running: APEXvj TURBO is a next-gen music visualizer for your Windows and Mac computer. It analyses and animates your music in real time! Synth : Remix Audio & Video in this HTML5 WebGL Synthesizer. Hat tip to Learning WebGL for pointing out these great projects to us.

Xilinx, Inc. announced the SDAccel development environment for OpenCL, C, and C++, enabling up to 25X better performance/watt for data center application acceleration leveraging FPGAs. SDAccel, the newest member of the SDx family, combines the industry’s first architecturally optimizing compiler supporting any combination of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels, along with libraries, development boards, and the first complete CPU/GPU-like development and run-time experience for FPGAs.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of updated OpenCL 2.0 and Provisional SYCL 1.2 specifications. The new specifications integrate feedback from the developer community, align with the latest C++ developments, and increase implementation consistency for improved portability of heterogeneous parallel applications. The latest OpenCL and SYCL specifications are open, royalty-free and available today.

Seekscale recently interviewed the COLLADA workgroup chair Fabrice Robinet about the COLLADA file format standard.

Organized by The Immersive Technology Alliance, the Immersed conference features two days of sessions by worldwide virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D experts. Some of the international speakers include John Gaeta (The Matrix Trilogy Academy Award winner, Lucasfilm), Mary Spio (Next Galaxy), Neil Trevett (The Khronos Group, Nvidia), Scott Broock (Jaunt), Shannon Blake Gans (New Deal Studios), Karl Krantz (Silicon Valley Virtual Reality), and more. Canada’s Habib Zargarpour (Creative Director, Microsoft Studios), Gord Harris (Christie Digital), David Nalasco (AMD), James Milward (Secret Location), Ana Serrano (Canadian Film Centre Media Lab), Ray Sharma (XMG Studio), James Stewart (Geneva Film Company), and more will also be speaking. Temporary code “ImmerseMe” reduces registration by $75. Deeply discounted exhibition options available for qualified early start-ups requiring media and investment group attention. Free exhibition opens to the general public on the Sunday afternoon. Limited space! Register for free online and in advance.

AMD FirePro S9150 GPUs are delivering more than 3 petaFLOPS of AMD FirePro S9150 server GPU performance for the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH in support of physics research related to heavy ion studies. Each of the 160 ASUS ESC4000 G2S nodes of the new L-CSC cluster include four AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs, for a total GPU peak of 3.25 petaFLOPS single precision and 1.62 petaFLOPS double precision performance. The cluster is enabling Lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics (Lattice QCD) computational research using one of the fastest OpenCL implementations for research applications in the world.

GizmoSphere, a not-for-profit embedded specialist, has announced the launch of a next-generation development board featuring a 1GHz dual-core AMD system-on-chip with Radeon HD8210E graphics on-board. The GPU supports OpenGL 4.2, OpenCL 1.2 and DirectX 11.1.

The “self-driving car” concept has captured the world’s imagination, and today’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are catalyzing this revolution. Freescale Semiconductor is propelling the industry forward by addressing two critical speed bumps on the path toward autonomous driving – the lack of open standards for ADAS system development, and the common-but-empty premise that consumer focused silicon solutions are safe enough for critical autonomous automotive applications. Freescale announced it will soon introduce an OpenCL-based automotive development environment engineered to open the market for car OEMs and tier-one suppliers alike to bring advanced driver assist and other ADAS technologies to a wider range of vehicles, faster. Read the complete press release.

Luxion KeyShot v5.1 is a conceptual design software that enables designers to import and enhance exisitng 3D models, creating variations for manufacturing, marketing or customer approval. KeyShots designers are able to import COLLADA files, as well as BIP, Alias WIRE, PTC Creo, Rhinoceros, SketchUp, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Pro/ENGINEER, IGES, STEP, OBJ, 3ds, and FBX data. Users can paint, modify lighting, adjust the camera angle, edit and select background to create an image in real time using these imported models.

GROMACS is a molecular simulation kit, which can do all kinds of “soft matter” simulations such as nanotubes, polymer chemistry, zeolites, adsorption studies, proteins, and more. It is being used by researches worldwide and is one of the bigger bio-informatics softwares around. Until now only CUDA was being used. To make it possible to use other accelerators, Stream Computing ported GROMACS to OpenCL. The folks at Stream Computing are looking for help on this project.