Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

Computational performance being our main objective, our target applications are characterized by intensive computation phases. Such applications are numerous in the domains of scientific computations, optimization, data mining and multimedia.

Applications involving intensive computations are necessarily high energy consumers. However this consumption can be significantly reduced thanks to optimization and parallelization. Although this issue is not our prior objective, we can expect some positive effects for the following reasons:

• Program parallelization tries to distribute the workload equally among the cores. Thus an equivalent performance, or even a better performance, to a sequential higher frequency execution on one single core, can be obtained.

• Memory and memory accesses are high energy consumers. Lowering the memory consumption, lowering the number of memory accesses and maximizing the number of accesses in the low levels of the memory hierarchy (registers, cache memories) have a positive consequence on execution speed, but also on energy consumption.