Section: Application Domains

Medium-size HPC applications

The medium-size applications we target are streaming algorithms  [19], scientific workflows  [52], and also the now very rich domain of deep learning applications  [40]. We explore the possibilities of writing (see Section 3.1) and compiling (see Section 3.3) applications using a dataflow language. As a first step, we will target dataflow programs written in SigmaC [22] for which the fine grain parallelism is not taken into account. In parallel, we will also study the problem of deriving relevant (with respect to safety or optimization) properties on dataflow programs with array iterators.

Obviously, large applications are not limited to assembly of compute kernels. Our languages and formalism definitions (3.1) and analyses (3.2) must also be able to deal with general programs. Our targets also include generalist programs with complex behaviors such as recursive programs operating on arrays, lists and trees; worklist algorithms (lists are not handled within the polyhedral domain). Analysis on these programs should be able to detect non licit memory accesses, memory consumption, hotspots, ..., and to prove functional properties.

The simulation activities (3.5) are both applied internally in CASH, to simulate intermediate representations, and for embedded systems. We are interested in Transaction-Level Models (TLM) of Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) including processors and hardware accelerators. TLM provides an abstract but executable model of the chip, with enough details to run the embedded software. We are particularly interested in models written in a loosely timed coding style. We plan to extend these to heterogeneous simulations including a SystemC/TLM part to model the numerical part of the chip, and other simulators to model physical parts of the system.