ESLD 2014 - Workshop on Electronic System-Level Design towards Heterogeneous Computing

Alessandro Cilardo is currently an assistant professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. He is the single or main author of numerous peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics Security, The Proceedings of the IEEE, DATE, FPL, ITC conferences, and others. His research activity focuses on highlevel, parallel programming paradigms for electronic system-level and FPGA design, including the automated translation of OpenMP-based multi-threaded programs to synthesizable HDL code. Other research topics include computer arithmetic, efficient implementation of cryptographic and security-related primitives, and HPC-based cryptanalysis.
David Thomas is a Lecturer in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, with a research interest in the acceleration of computationally intensive problems using technology such as GPUs and FPGAs. One area of focus is the development of tightly optimised libraries, such as random number generators for Monte Carlo, using new algorithms customised for the target architecture. Another topic of interest is the creation of high-level programming tools for heterogeneous platforms, allowing a single piece of source code to target multiple acceleration platforms.
Description
Heterogeneous computing is emerging as a new important trend in computer architecture and highperformance computing. It refers to systems combining a variety of different computational units, such as general-purpose processors, special-purpose units, i.e. digital signal processors or the graphics processing units (GPUs), co-processors, custom accelerators, typically implemented on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The heterogeneous computing paradigm is rapidly extending its range to the development of complex embedded systems, multi-processor systems on chip and, in general, application-specific custom machines. The inclusion of FPGAs as heterogeneous accelerators for HPC platforms, furthermore, is introducing new challenges related to programmability, abstraction and programming paradigms, as well as new opportunities for hardware-accelerated high-performance and scientific computing applications. In fact, there are currently a large number of ongoing research projects and industrial initiatives centered on heterogeneous computing. The workshop will offer a global view of this rich and diverse research scenario. Representing the perspectives of both academia and industry, the talks will particularly address important cross-cutting issues involving system-level and embedded design in the light of the emerging heterogeneous computing trends.
Scope of the workshop and target audience
Heterogeneous computing involves a wide spectrum of research issues, such as programming paradigms, productivity, correctness, code optimization, processing and memory architectures. The workshop will cover all these aspects going from market trends to research issues and real-world applications. The talks will mostly have a tutorial nature and will put particular emphasis on opportunities for cross-fertilization. Touching a range of different research issues and perspectives, the workshop particularly targets researchers, industry experts, and students from many different areas, including:
electronic design automation;
computer architecture;
parallel programming, compilation, code optimization;
high-performance computing (HPC).