Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

INRIA Associate Teams

• YOUHUA: ICT-INRIA associate team. The goal of the team is to investigate a programming approach for heterogeneous multi-cores.

  The likely path forward for architectures are heterogeneous multi-cores composed of a mix of cores and hardware accelerators (ASICs or reconfigurable circuits). Now, whether the architectures are homogeneous multi-cores or heterogeneous multi-cores, the difficulty to efficiently program such architectures remains the key issue. We propose a programming approach that is pragmatic and capable of letting non-expert users take advantage of the performance of homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-cores. Rather than asking programmers to understand architectures and write parallel or RTL (for accelerators) versions of their code, we ask programmers to explicit the algorithms they are using within their codes, and we rely on expert programmers to provide efficient parallel or RTL implementations of these algorithms. Not only this approach can make it possible for non-expert users to take advantage of complex architectures, but it also makes programs portable across a broad range of architectures, and furthermore, it considerably expands the opportunities for automatically tuning applications and architectures.

Visits of International Scientists

• Jing Huang sent by ICT and Chinese Academy of Science for 10 months in France, for cooperation on reconfigurable accelerator.

• Numerous stays in China in 2011 by Olivier Temam (about once per month).

Participation In International Programs

• YOUHUA at LIAMA: LIAMA is (originally) an INRIA-Chinese Academy of Sciences lab (now Europe-China CS lab), and we just established a joint team at LIAMA, also called YOUHUA. Unlike YOUHUA, this joint team is INRIA-ICT-EPFL. The goal is both the design of reconfigurable accelerators, and programming approaches for heterogeneous multi-cores.