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CoCoUnit: An Energy-Efficient Processing Unit for Cognitive Computing

Description du projet

Construire la révolution de l’informatique cognitive

L’informatique moderne se concentre de plus en plus sur l’exécution intelligente de tâches de type humain. Ces tâches font souvent partie de ce que l’on appelle l’informatique cognitive. L’informatique cognitive est considérée comme la prochaine étape de l’informatique, offrant aux utilisateurs des expériences et des services inédits. Les avantages apportés par l’informatique cognitive exigeront une puissance de traitement plus élevée associée à une faible consommation d’énergie. Le projet CoCoUnit, financé par l’UE, va relever ce défi en étudiant des architectures informatiques radicalement nouvelles qui pourraient offrir une plus grande puissance de traitement à un moindre coût énergétique. L’objectif principal consiste à mettre au point une unité de traitement révolutionnaire capable de compléter les unités de traitement conventionnelles pour réaliser la révolution de l’informatique cognitive du futur.

Objectif

There is a fast-growing interest in extending the capabilities of computing systems to perform human-like tasks in an intelligent way. These technologies are usually referred to as cognitive computing. We envision a next revolution in computing in the forthcoming years that will be driven by deploying many “intelligent” devices around us in all kind of environments (work, entertainment, transportation, health care, etc.) backed up by “intelligent” servers in the cloud. These cognitive computing systems will provide new user experiences by delivering new services or improving the operational efficiency of existing ones, and altogether will enrich our lives and our economy.

A key characteristic of cognitive computing systems will be their capability to process in real time large amounts of data coming from audio and vision devices, and other type of sensors. This will demand a very high computing power but at the same time an extremely low energy consumption. This very challenging energy-efficiency requirement is a sine qua non to success not only for mobile and wearable systems, where power dissipation and cost budgets are very low, but also for large data centers where energy consumption is a main component of the total cost of ownership.

Current processor architectures (including general-purpose cores and GPUs) are not a good fit for this type of systems since they keep the same basic organization as early computers, which were mainly optimized for “number crunching”. CoCoUnit will take a disruptive direction by investigating unconventional architectures that can offer orders of magnitude better efficiency in terms of performance per energy and cost for cognitive computing tasks. The ultimate goal of this project is to devise a novel processing unit that will be integrated with the existing units of a processor (general-purpose cores and GPUs) and altogether will be able to deliver cognitive computing user experiences with extremely high energy-efficiency.

Régime de financement

ERC-ADG - Advanced Grant

Institution d’accueil

UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 2 498 661,00
Adresse
CALLE JORDI GIRONA 31
08034 Barcelona
Espagne

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Région
Este Cataluña Barcelona
Type d’activité
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Liens
Coût total
€ 2 498 661,00

Bénéficiaires (1)