Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing (SAAHPC)

Andrew Chien to give keynote on evaluating and exploiting heterogeneity

Andrew A. Chien, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, will give a keynote talk at SAAHPC 2012 called "Can we Systematically Evaluate and Exploit Heterogeneous Accelerators? A 10x10 Perspective."

Abstract: In the waning generations of Moore’s law, the race is full on to exploit any and all techniques to deliver performance and energy efficiency gains. These include extreme parallelism, extreme voltage scaling (NTV), better-than-worst-case design, and heterogeneous architecture. Of these, perhaps heterogeneity is the most difficult to evaluate for its practical progress and long-term impact. We will discuss a range of efforts, all part of the 10x10 project, to develop the capability to systematically evaluate and exploit heterogeneity. Specifically, these include methods to evaluate comparatively the performance of a range of heterogeneous accelerators. Also, we will discuss results from efforts to assess the broad suitability of both Department of Energy workloads and general-purpose computing workloads for heterogeneous accelerators, and specific opportunities
in those areas. Finally, we’ll discuss future directions in developing 10x10 architectures and programming systems.