PEPPHER · Performance Portability and Programmability for Heterogeneous Many-core Architectures

The emergence of highly parallel, heterogeneous, often incompatible and highly diverse, many-core processors poses major challenges to the European software-intensive industry. It is imperative that such architectures can be fully exploited without starting from scratch with each new design. In particular, there is an urgent need for techniques for efficient, productive and portable programming of heterogeneous many-cores.PEPPHER will provide a unified framework for programming architecturally diverse, heterogeneous many-core processors to ensure performance portability. PEPPHER will advance state-of-the-art in its five technical work areas:(1)\tMethods and tools for component based software; (2) Portable compilation techniques; (3) Data structures and adaptive, autotuned algorithms; (4) Efficient, flexible run-time systems; and (5) Hardware support for autotuning, synchronization and scheduling.PEPPHER is unique in proposing direct compilation to the target architectures. Portability is supported by powerful composition methods and a toolbox of adaptive algorithms. Heterogeneity is further managed by efficient run-time schedulers. The PEPPHER framework will thus ensure that applications execute with maximum efficiency on each supported platform.PEPPHER is driven by challenging benchmarks from the industrial partners. Results will be widely disseminated through high-quality publications, workshops and summer-schools, and an edited volume of major results. Techniques and software prototypes will be exploited by the industrial partners. A project website (www.peppher.eu) gives continuity to the dissemination effort.The PEPPHER consortium unites Europe's leading experts and consists of world-class research centres and universities (INRIA, Chalmers, LIU, KIT, TUW, UNIVIE), a major company (Intel) and European multi-core SMEs (Codeplay and Movidius), and has the required expertise to accomplish the ambitious but realistic goals of PEPPHER.