Irregular computations on heterogeneous multi-core architectures

并行计算涉及使用多台计算机快速和协作地解决给定问题。医疗、交通网络和金融领域的问题产生了大量的数据，需要实时处理这些数据。并行计算成为这些应用的基础。如今，通用计算机（PC）不是带有一个CPU（中央处理器或处理器），而是带有2个，4个或8个相同的处理器（或核心），允许同时执行许多任务。近来，图形处理单元（GPU）在诸如游戏、视频和多媒体的应用中已经成为主流。单个GPU上有数百个处理元素，提供大量数据并行性（例如，视频屏幕上的每个像素都可以独立处理）。这些GPU作为单个芯片提供，可以安装在任何PC上。 CPU和GPU一起提供大量的并行性，被称为多核机器。PlayStation（PS3）是多核机器的典型例子。人们提出的问题是，我们将如何处理这些功能强大的计算机，以及除了游戏之外，还可以在这些机器上编写哪些应用程序？本研究集中的应用之一是医学成像。确定一个有机体的内部结构，有足够的细节来产生病人的诊断信息，是管理任何程序之前的第一步。医学成像是医生评估患者身体通常不可见的区域的过程。有许多成像技术。这项研究的重点是计算机断层扫描和新兴的微波断层扫描技术的乳腺癌检测。任何成像技术中的图像都需要大量的存储空间，并且需要快速处理以对患者做出实时决策。因此，本研究的重点将放在多核复杂算法的设计和性能评估上，以解决医学成像技术中的问题。这项研究也将集中在使用强大的计算机在交通网络和金融问题的计算问题。

Parallel computing involves using many computers to solve a given problem fast and cooperatively. Problems in medicine, transportation networks and finance produce significant amounts of data that require processing of the information in real-time. Parallel computing becomes fundamental for these applications. These days, general-purpose computers (PC) come with not one CPU (central processing unit or processor) but with 2, 4 or 8 identical processors (or cores), allowing simultaneous execution of many tasks. Recently, graphical processing units (GPUs) have become mainstream in applications such as games, video, and multimedia. There are more than hundreds of processing elements on a single GPU providing lots of data parallelism (for example, each pixel on the video screen can be processed independently). These GPUs come as a single chip and can be installed on any PC. CPU together with GPUs provide massive amount of parallelism and are called multi-core machines. Play Station (PS3) is a typical example of a multi-core machine. The question one asks is what are we going to do with these powerful computers and what applications besides games can be programmed on these machines? One of the applications this research concentrates on is medical imaging. Determining the internal structure of an organism, with sufficient detail to yield diagnostic information of a patient, is a first step before administering any procedure. Medical imaging is the process by which physicians evaluate an area of the patient's body that is not normally visible. There are many imaging techniques. This research focuses on computed tomography and emerging microwave tomography techniques for breast cancer detection. The images in any of the imaging techniques require large amounts of storage space and need to be processed fast to make real-time decisions on the patient. Therefore, the focus of this proposed research will be on the design and performance evaluation of sophisticated algorithms on multi-cores for problems in medical imaging techniques. This research will also focus on computational issues in using the powerful computers for problems in transportation network and finance.