LECTURERS

• Antonio R. Miele
• Marco D. Santambrogio

MISSION AND GOALS

The course introduces students to the concept of Heterogeneous System Architectures, an increasingly adopted architectural paradigm in the entire computing spectrum (from Embedded Systems to HPC), by discussing its main opportunities and challenges in resources’ programmability and management.

SUBJECT AND PROGRAMME OF THE COURSE

The course will delve into current/state of the art solutions, opportunities and challenges related to Heterogeneous System Architectures. These systems integrate heterogeneous units (e.g., multicore CPUs, GPUs and programmable HW accelerators) to exploit resources with different characteristics (with respect, for instance, to performance and power consumption). However, heterogeneity presents several challenges, in particular related to processing resource management; in fact there is a quest for approaches for an efficient distribution of these resources among the running applications considering that the workload may also change over the time. The course will cover these issues.

The course is organized in a set of lectures on the following topics: Introduction to HSA, Multiprocessor CPUs, GPUs, Programmable HW accelerators (focusing on the architectures and related programming models), Memory model and communication infrastructure, Challenges and the opportunities in the resource management of the HSA.

TEACHING MATERIALS

The teaching material consists of the slides that will be used during the lectures, a set of relevant literature papers presenting relevant approaches or surveys to the considered topic, and a set of machines and development boards implementing the HSA paradigm that are already available in the NECST lab.

The student can choose between two evaluation methods:

1. A presentation of the literature review on a specific topic presented during the course, or
2. A short implementation project on a real board or in a simulation framework.