Tim Besard
Tim Besard is a software engineer at JuliaHub, where he leads GPU support and development for the Julia programming language. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science engineering from Ghent University, Belgium, and has been a key contributor to Julia's GPU ecosystem since 2014. Tim maintains several foundational GPU packages including CUDA.jl, GPUArrays.jl, GPUCompiler.jl, and LLVM.jl, which together form the backbone of GPU computing in Julia.
Session
OpenCL.jl is one of the oldest GPU programming packages in Julia. We recently revived this package, integrating it with the JuliaGPU ecosystem and enabling native compilation of Julia code through SPIR-V. This allows programming modern OpenCL accelerators, including CPUs through the PoCL library. The end result is a high-quality CPU backend for KernelAbstractions.jl that outperforms the existing tasks-based implementation.