I have just returned from HiPEAC, a major “roadshow” of primarily European research in high performance and embedded computing. As always, it was good to catch up with old friends and colleagues from around the world. I briefly describe below some of the highlights for me, as well as my contributions as part of a panel discussion held on Tuesday.
The keynote talk at PARMA-DITAM from my old friend Pedro Diniz on compiler transformations for resilience. A theme that kept coming up throughout the conference, and is also a key topic of the large project I have with Southampton, Manchester and Newcastle Universities.
Kirsten Eder’s talk at the ICT-ENERGY workshop on the work at Bristol on modelling power consumption in the XMOS architecture. An interesting choice, it turns out, because the communication in XMOS is transparent to the programmer, which makes power modelling at instruction level much more appealing.
Another old friend, Juergen Teich, gave a great keynote at IMPACT on extending scheduling to the parametric / symbolic case, in order to allow for the number and shape of a rectangular array of processing units to be determined at run time rather than at compile time. This aligns very nicely with our own drive to parametricity, in our case for run-time pipelining decisions in high-level synthesis.
Cristiano Malossi from IBM gave an interesting keynote at WAPCO on mixed precision conjugate gradient solvers, amongst other things. My former PhD student Antonio Roldao Lopes did an early investigation into how the precision of such a solver impacts its performance (lower precision, more iterations, but each iteration runs faster). It was interesting to see this extended to a mixed precision setting, where expensive parts of the algorithm are executed in low precision while cheap parts are executed in high precision.
I was invited to participate in a panel discussion in front of the audience at the WRC workshop. The other panelists were Aaron Smith, who is writing compilers for the Microsoft FPGA system now in the Bing search engine, Ronan Keryell, who does high-level design R&D at Xilinx, Peter Hofstee, from IBM, and Koen Bertels from TU Delft. The panel was moderated by another old friend, Juergen Becker. We were asked to discuss whether “the embedded revolution is dead” or whether it’s “just the microprocessor” whose death has come (!), and what the future holds. My perspective was that the embedded revolution has not started yet (how much computational intelligence is embedded in most things around us, and how much better could our lives be if there were more?), that the microprocessor is far from dead (though future microprocessors will look far more ‘FPGA-like’ as the number of cores expand beyond the point at which it becomes unreasonable to ignore the fact we’re computing in space), and that the future belongs to high performance embedded systems based on heterogeneous architectures. I don’t think there was much disagreement from other members of the panel. Juergen did his tongue-in-cheek best to start an IBM-and-Microsoft-versus-others fight by suggesting that it was actually datacentres which are dead, though I think there is a general consensus that the balance between local and cloud-based compute needs to be carefully evaluated in future system designs and that neither will kill the other.
Questions from the audience were interesting because people seem mostly worried about how to program these damn things! Which is good for those of us working on exactly this question, of course. The panel’s view was that with today’s compiler technology, the two main options were Domain Specific Languages and OpenCL. I made the point that architecture specialisation, and FPGA design in particular, is naturally aligned with static analysis – you get automatic specialisation by automatically understanding what you’re going to implement; I therefore ventured that future languages for heterogeneous computing, whatever they are, will be designed to make static analysis a simpler task.
Thinking 