Project History & Acknowledgments

The SPOC and Sarek projects are the result of over a decade of research into high-level abstractions for GPGPU programming.

Origins

This work originated as part of Mathias Bourgoin’s PhD thesis at the UPMC-LIP6 laboratory in Paris, France. The initial research was partially funded by the OpenGPU project.

Development Timeline

• 2011 - 2013: Initial development at UPMC-LIP6 (Paris).
• 2014 - 2015: Continued research at the Verimag laboratory (Grenoble, France).
• 2015 - 2018: Extended development at the LIFO laboratory (Orléans, France).
• 2024 - Present: Significant modernization for OCaml 5 and new GPU backends.

Current Status

I currently work at Nomadic Labs and continue to maintain Sarek as an open-source project.

The recent modernization efforts (2024-2026) were completed with assistance from AI agents, focusing on OCaml 5 compatibility, plugin-based architecture, and comprehensive test coverage.

Contact

Mathias Bourgoin
mathias.bourgoin (at) gmail.com