Trends of SW Platforms for Heterogeneous Multi-core systems and Open Source Community Activities

Date: 2014.05.23

presentation file link:
http://www.slideshare.net/sshtel/trends-of-sw-platforms-for-heterogeneous-multicore-systems-and-open-source-community-activities-iset2014

  Heterogeneous system architecture today is not an early technology trend anymore. This architecture is already widely accepted in various computer industries such as personal computers and mobile devices.
  Typical single-core architecture faced limitations of performance growth in the past. The multi-core architecture era  arrived decades ago. Early multi-core architectures were basically based on homogeneous system architecture which gained performance by just adding cores. However, even though each core shows high performance and it is usable for general purpose, many-core architecture is not easily accepted for many domains except server clustering industry because of its price. Furthermore, end-user devices like PC or mobile phone require more various particular tasks rather than a few performance-oriented tasks. One of the needs is graphic processing which drives development of GPU. Many heterogeneous system architecture utilizes CPU and GPU usually on the same silicon chip.
  Multi-core era also saw some interesting developments with advances of GPU. Since GPUs have parallel vector processing capabilities that enable them to compute large sets of data, people tried to utilize them for general purporse computation beyond graphic processing. And even parallel processing consumed much lower power relative to similar works on CPUs. Although GPUs have definate advantages above, vector processing is not always good answer. CPUs are still better for certain problems and we cannot dump typical abundant software libraries and solutions. This is because CPU-GPU coupled architecture trend has been risen up.
  Heterogeneous system is very sophisticated. Thus software industry faced a truly hard portability issue that programmers cannot support all different platform by re-writing code. To overcome this issue, the HSA Foundation which is open industry standard organization for heterogeneous system was formed. The goal of HSA is to help system designers integrate different architecture easily and provide advanced approaches and standard software infrastructure such as compiler and language.
  In this presentation, today’s trend of heterogeneous system and its software platform technologies will be introduced, especially CPU-GPU offloading and OpenCL. By these trend changes, there have been many efforts to improve heterogeneous system software platform in Korea. Researches driven by the Korean Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, the ETRI, will be introduced. Research works are not only included but an open source community to try and evaluate software technologies developed by the ETRI also organized and its activities will be introduced in this presentation too.