CSR: Small: Elastic Computing - An Enabling Technology for Transparent, Portable, and Adaptive Multi-Core Heterogeneous Computing

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。计算体系结构越来越并行，大多数依赖于多核微处理器。异构性也在增加，系统组合了从多个微处理器、现场可编程门阵列(FGA)、图形处理单元(GPU)等不同组件，常常导致加速10倍至100倍。一些研究重点集中在利用计算体系结构中的并行性和异构性相关的挑战，包括旨在简化并行编程的语言。尽管进行了大量的编译和合成研究，但由于显著增加了应用程序设计的复杂性，此类系统的使用在很大程度上仅限于设备专家。为了降低设计复杂性，这个项目将研究弹性计算，这是一个在动态优化不同运行时参数(如输入大小、电池寿命等)的同时，跨众多异类资源自动并行应用程序的框架。弹性计算克服了编译器和合成工具的限制，为优化框架提供了额外的函数知识，从而能够自动探索数千种可能的实现，即使是使用不同算法的实现。该项目建立了弹性计算的基本理论，并在许多体系结构和应用领域得到验证，从而为未来的更多研究奠定了基础。此外，该项目将使没有编程专业知识的科学家能够更容易地为强大的多核不同系统开发应用程序，从而实现可能推动科学状况的新模拟。该项目还将把弹性计算纳入研究生课程，并将涉及与东南研究生教育联盟和东南亚教育研究所(SEAGEP)合作，为本科生研究招收代表性不足的学生。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Computing architectures are increasingly parallel, most relying on multi-core microprocessors. Trends are also towards increased heterogeneity, with systems combining diverse components ranging from multiple microprocessors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), among others, often resulting in speedups of 10x to 100x. A number of research thrusts have focused on the challenges associated with utilizing parallelism and heterogenity in computing architectures, including languages aimed at simplifying parallel programming. Despite numerous compiler and synthesis studies, usage of such systems has largely been limited to device experts due to significantly increased application design complexity. To reduce design complexity, this project will investigate elastic computing, which is a framework to automatically parallelize an application across numerous heterogeneous resources while dynamically optimizing for different runtime parameters such as input size, battery life, etc. Elastic computing overcomes limitations of compilers and synthesis tools by providing the optimization framework with extra knowledge of functions, thus enabling automatic exploration of thousands of possible implementations, even ones using different algorithms. This project establishes an underlying theory for elastic computing, validated for numerous architectures and application domains, thus laying the foundation for much future research. In addition, the project will enable scientists without programming expertise to more easily develop applications for powerful multi-core heterogeneous systems, thus enabling new simulations that may advance the state of science. The project will also integrate elastic computing into graduate curriculum and will involve collaboration with the South East Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (SEAGEP) to recruit underrepresented students for undergraduate research.