Project description
Computing Systems
To provide an integrated set of tools which will simplify software development for many-core systems with increased portability and scalability, deliver high performance and maintain power efficiency
The consumer quest for computing power is insatiable. In the past, chip manufacturers could increase processing power by simply increasing the speed of the processor core. However, in recent years, these manufacturers have come up against a natural barrier to their previous approach. In response to the resulting performance wall, desktop computer companies have followed the example of server producers by adding more cores to their products - and now the producers of mobile devices, which include the new iPhone 4s and Samsung Galaxy S II, are following suit. To keep up with the demand, the current trend in computer systems is to double the number of cores comprising contemporary processors approximately every two years, leading to hundreds of cores per chip in the near future. Developing applications that harness this computational power, however, is a complex, laborious task that often requires specialized training. Moreover, applying traditional programming methods can negatively impact processing efficiency and drive up power consumption.
The ENCORE Project focuses on alleviating these problems by proposing a programming model for multi-cores and delivering an integrated set of tools (the ENCORE Stack) which will simplify software development for many-core systems with increased portability and scalability, while at the same time providing high performance and maintaining power efficiency for real-world applications. Specifically, ENCORE aims to reduce the number of lines of code required to adapt an application for mult-core by 90% which translates to less development time and potentially faster, cheaper time-to-market.
Design complexity and power density implications stopped the trend towards faster single-core processors. The current trend is to double the core count every 18 months, leading to chips with 100+ cores in 10-15 years. Developing parallel applications to harness such multicores is the key challenge for scalable computing systems. The ENCORE project aims at achieving a breakthrough on the usability, reliability, code portability, and performance scalability of such multicores.The project achieves this through three main contributions. First, defining an easy to use parallel programming model that offers code portability across several architectures. Second, developing a runtime management system that will dynamically detect, manage, and exploit parallelism, data locality, and shared resources. And third, providing adequate hardware support for the parallel programming and runtime environment that ensures scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency.The technology will be developed and evaluated using multiple applications, provided by the partners, or industry-standard benchmarks, ranging from massively parallel high-performance computing codes, where performance and efficiency are paramount, to embedded parallel workloads with strong real-time and energy constraints.The project integrates all partners under a common runtime system running on real multicore platforms, a shared FPGA architecture prototype, and a large-scale software simulated architecture. Architecture features will be validated through implementation on ARM's detailed development infrastructure.ENCORE takes a holistic approach to parallelization and programmability by analyzing the requirements of several relevant applications ranging from High Performance Computing to embedded multicore, by parallelizing these applications using the proposed programming model, by optimizing the runtime system for a range of parallel architectures, and by developing hardware support for the runtime system.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-ICT-2009-4
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Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator Contact
Coordinator
08034 Barcelona
Spain