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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 FLEXTILES

Participants : Olivier Sentieys, Emmanuel Casseau, Daniel Chillet, Philippe Quémerais, Christophe Huriaux.

  • Program: FP7-ICT-2011-7

  • Project acronym: Flextiles

  • Duration: Oct. 2011 - Mar. 2015

  • Coordinator: Thales

  • 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 defined and developed an energy-efficient yet programmable heterogeneous manycore platform with self-adaptive capabilities. The manycore is 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 raised 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. This project ended in 2015.

FP7 ALMA

Participants : Steven Derrien, Olivier Sentieys, Ali Hassan El-Moussawi.

  • Program: FP7-ICT-2011-7

  • Project acronym: Alma

  • Project title: Architecture oriented paraLlelization for high performance embedded Multicore systems using scilAb

  • Duration: Sep. 2011 - Nov. 2014

  • Coordinator: KIT

  • 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 aimed 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 was a fundamental step forward in the necessary introduction of novel computing paradigms and methodologies. This project ended in 2015.