HPCwire: Project PEPPHER Announced

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February 26, 2010

Project PEPPHER Announced

Feb. 26 -- The emergence of multicore processors with often significantly different architectures and capabilities not only reflects different application needs (graphics, signal processing, numerical acceleration, power constraints) but also a potentially critical lack of convergence toward a common base architecture upon which parallel applications can be built. Ensuring portability of real applications across such differing (heterogeneous) multicore platforms, including means of reasoning about performance (processor utilization, time-to-solution, power consumption), is evidently a major issue for the software-intensive industry. Such methods must also extend to Systems on Chip (SoC processors) -- hybrids -- that themselves are composed of different types of parallel processing elements.

The newly-started European FP7 project PEPPHER (for "PErformance Portability and Programmability of Heterogeneous many-core aRchitectures") is an ambitious research effort that addresses some of these issues. Lasting till the end of 2012, PEPPHER summons the forces of four world-class universities (Universities of Vienna, Chalmers, Linkoeping, and Karlsruhe), a leading research center (INRIA), two innovative European SMEs (Code play and Movidius) and a European lab of a major vendor (Intel).

PEPPHER aims to devise a methodology and framework for efficient development of applications that can be ported with reasonable effort across different types of both homogeneous and hybrid multicore systems under preservation of crucial performance aspects. This will include a high-level compositional framework for developing applications from parallelized components, compiler support for efficient translation of components to different target architectures and configurations, algorithms that can adapt statically as well as dynamically to different architectural parameters, efficient run-time support for scheduling compiled components on available cores of different types, and hardware support-mechanisms for programmability and portability.

The approach of PEPPHER is unique in not proposing a single virtual machine or portability layer but allowing different components to be both expressed and compiled by the methods most applicable to the architectures on which the component may run. The challenges of the project are to make linguistic, algorithmic and run-time elements fit together, and present these to the application programmer as a usable methodology (with corresponding prototypes) that can guarantee efficient portability across a variety of typical heterogeneous and homogeneous multicore architectures. New algorithms and data-structures will be devised for high-level application development and low-level runtime support, which can be adapted to different parallel architectures. Furthermore, the project expects to generate feedback to hardware developers on hardware support for performance portability and parallel algorithmics.

Resource: www.peppher.eu

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Source: PEPPHER

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