Quasar: unlocking the power of heterogeneous hardware
Jonas De Vylder, Bart Goossens · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2015
Computationally and data intensive applications, such as video processing algorithms, are traditionally developed in programming languages such as C/C++. In order to cope with the more demanding requirements (e.g., real-time processing of large datasets), hardware accelerators such as GPUs have emerged to aid multi-core CPUs for computationally intensive tasks. Because these accelerators offer performance improvements for many (but often not all) operations, the programmer needs to decide which parts of the code are best to be developed for the accelerator or the CPU. Development for heterogeneous devices comes at a cost: 1) the sophisticated programming and debugging techniques lead to a steep learning curve, 2) development and optimization often requires huge efforts and time from the programmer, 3) often different versions of the code for different target platforms need to be written, 4) the resulting code may not be future-proof: it is not guaranteed to work optimally on future devices. In this talk we present a new programming language, Quasar, which mitigates these common drawbacks. Quasar is an easy-to-learn, high-level programming language that is hardware-independent, ideal for both rapid prototyping and full deployment on heterogeneous hardware.