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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 FLEXTILES
Participants : Olivier Sentieys, Emmanuel Casseau, Antoine Courtay, Daniel Chillet, Philippe Quémerais, Christophe Huriaux, Quang-Hoa Le.
Other partners: Thales (FR), UR1 (FR), KIT (GE), TU/e (NL), CSEM (SW), CEA LETI (FR), Sundance (UK)
Project title: Self Adaptive Heterogeneous Manycore Based on Flexible Tiles
A major challenge in computing is to leverage multi-core technology to develop energy-efficient high performance systems. This is critical for embedded systems with a very limited energy budget as well as for supercomputers in terms of sustainability. Moreover the efficient programming of multi-core architectures, as we move towards manycores with more than a thousand cores predicted by 2020, remains an unresolved issue. The FlexTiles project will define and develop an energy-efficient yet programmable heterogeneous manycore platform with self-adaptive capabilities. The manycore will be associated with an innovative virtualisation layer and a dedicated tool-flow to improve programming efficiency, reduce the impact on time to market and reduce the development cost by 20 to 50%. FlexTiles will raise the accessibility of the manycore technology to industry - from small SMEs to large companies - thanks to its programming efficiency and its ability to adapt to the targeted domain using embedded reconfigurable technologies.
FP7 ALMA
Participants : Steven Derrien, Romuald Rocher, Olivier Sentieys, Maxime Naullet, Ali Hassan El Moussawi.
Project title: Architecture oriented paraLlelization for high performance embedded Multicore systems using scilAb
Other partners: KIT (GE), UR1 (FR), Recore Systems (NL), Univ. of Peloponnese (GR), TEI-MES (GR), Intracom SA (GR), Fraunhofer (GE)
The mapping process of high performance embedded applications to today's multiprocessor system on chip devices suffers from a complex toolchain and programming process. The problem here is the expression of parallelism with a pure imperative programming language which is commonly C. This traditional approach limits the mapping, partitioning and the generation of optimized parallel code, and consequently the achievable performance and power consumption of applications from different domains. The Architecture oriented paraLlelization for high performance embedded Multicore systems using scilAb (ALMA) project aims to bridge these hurdles through the introduction and exploitation of a Scilab-based toolchain which enables the efficient mapping of applications on multiprocessor platforms from high-level abstraction descriptions. This holistic solution of the toolchain allows the complexity of both the application and the architecture to be hidden, which leads to a better acceptance, reduced development cost and shorter time-to-market. Driven by the technology restrictions in chip design, the end of Moore's law and an unavoidable increasing request of computing performance, ALMA is a fundamental step forward in the necessary introduction of novel computing paradigms and methodologies. ALMA helps to strengthen the position of Europe in the world market of multiprocessor targeted software toolchains. The challenging research will be achieved by the unique ALMA consortium which brings together industry and academia. High class partners from industry such as Recore and Intracom, will contribute their expertise in reconfigurable hardware technology for multi-core systems-on-chip, software development tools and real world applications. The academic partners will contribute their outstanding expertise in reconfigurable computing and compilation tools development.
Collaborations with Major European Organizations
Imec (Belgium), Scenario-based fixed-point data format refinement to enable energy-scalable of Software Defined Radios (SDR)
Lund University (Sweden), Constraints programming approach application in the reconfigurable data-paths synthesis flow
Code and Cryptography group of University College Cork (Ireland), Arithmetic operators for cryptography and WSN for health monitoring
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - EPFL (Switzerland), Optimization of systems using fixed-point arithmetic
Hervé Yviquel spent 4 months in the group of Jarmo Takala at Tampere University of Technology, Finland, from March.