Final Report Summary - I-CORES (Hypervisor-Based Synthesis of Custom Execution Environments on Multi-Core Systems) The I-CORES project (http://www.ics.forth.gr/carv/proj/icores.html) achieved significant improvements on the performance and energy-efficiency of many-core distributed and embedded systems. Originally conceived as a solution to overcome the performance and power limitations of instruction-level parallelism, many-core processors are now ubiquitous in systems ranging from mobile clients to datacenters. I-CORES focused on those aspects of many-core processors that enable efficient virtualised hosting environments for high performance computing applications. The project made significant advances towards scaling up and out the software stack of homogeneous and heterogeneous many-core servers. These advances materialised into across the software sack: from the programming language implementation, where the project delivered new scalable implementations of Google's MapReduce programming model for leading architectures such as Nvidia GPUs and Intel SCC, to the runtime system, where the project explored novel energy- and performance-aware methods for scheduling and memory management, to the operating system and firmware, where the project developed new methods to seamlessly migrate code between heterogeneous instruction set architectures and new performance and power instrumentation tools for component-level monitoring in virtualised environments. The computer systems market is work approximately eight trillion (source: electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC) the European technology platform for nanoelectronics), underpinning almost 16 % of the global economy. I-CORES developed software and tools that will enable scalable services on virtualised datacenters, which is a major future revenue generator for the Information and communications technology (ICT) industry. At the same time, I-CORES developed technology that would help major European vendors of hardware intellectual property (IP) to establish technological leadership, via software that enables efficient and productive use of their products. I-CORES trained early-stage researchers in the fundamentals of software and tools for future and emerging computing systems; it transferred skills and knowledge to undergraduate and graduate computer science education, particularly in the themes of programming, operating systems and computer architecture; it disseminated its results through publications in premier journals and conferences of parallel computing (such as journal of parallel and distributed computing (JPDC) and international parallel and distributed processing symposium (IPDPS)), through widely accessible articles in the popular press and through numerous seminars in European and international for a (such as meetings of the European network of excellence in high performance and embedded architectures and compilation, and the annual institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE)/ association for computing machinery (ACM) supercomputing conference); it engaged actively and aligned with the roadmaps of leading computing system technology providers in Europe, including advanced RISC machine (ARM) and systems applications and products (SAP), and major multi-national corporations, including international business machines (IBM) and Intel; and it paved the path for numerous European research collaborations and joint funded research projects between the host institution, academic groups, industry and supercomputing centers in Europe.
