Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Applications for the Heterogeneous Computing Era
Pavan Balaji, Satoshi Matsuoka · The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications · 2013
As we look beyond the petascale era, accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and Intel many integrated cores (MIC), as well as upcoming integrated hybrid processing cores are expected to play a preeminent role in architecting the largest systems in the world. While there is significant interest in these architectures, much of this interest is an artifact of the hype associated with them. With the rapid proliferation of different forms and flavors of accelerators in the market, understanding their capabilities and shortcomings is an important part of their ability to impact the largest systems in the world. Despite the importance of such architectures, research in gaining such understanding of these accelerators is still up and coming. This special issue focuses on understanding the implications of accelerators on the architectures and programming environments of future systems. It seeks to ground accelerator research through studies of application kernels or whole applications on such systems, as well as tools and libraries that improve the performance or productivity of applications trying to use these systems.