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。计算架构越来越并行，大多数依赖于多核微处理器。 趋势也朝着增加异质性的方向发展，系统结合了多种组件，包括多个微处理器、现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）、图形处理单元（GPU）等，通常会导致10倍到100倍的加速。许多研究重点都集中在与在计算架构中利用并行性和异构性相关的挑战上，包括旨在简化并行编程的语言。尽管有许多编译器和合成研究，由于应用程序设计的复杂性显着增加，这种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，该项目将研究弹性计算，这是一个框架，可以在众多异构资源上自动并行化应用程序，同时动态优化不同的运行时参数，如输入大小，电池寿命等。弹性计算通过为优化框架提供额外的功能知识，从而能够自动探索数千种可能的实现，甚至是使用不同算法的实现。该项目为弹性计算建立了一个基础理论，并在许多架构和应用领域得到了验证，从而为未来的研究奠定了基础。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异构系统开发应用程序，从而实现可能推动科学发展的新模拟。该项目还将把弹性计算纳入研究生课程，并将与东南研究生教育联盟和教授协会（SEAGEP）合作，招募代表性不足的学生进行本科研究。

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.