ADVANCE DevCamp at Liebenau 14-21 Sept. 2013

The IST research project ADVANCE (Asynchronous and Dynamic Virtualisation through performance ANalysis to support Concurrency Engineering) addresses the dynamic adaptation of concurrent applications based on statistical performance feedback.

Multi-core/many-core systems offer potential, both for cheap, scalable high-performance computing and also for significant reductions in power consumption compared with conventional processor technologies. At the same time, cores are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous. While current programming technologies are (just) coping with the small-scale homogeneous dual-core and quad-core processors available today, new programming paradigms are needed to deal with the massive numbers of heterogeneous cores that will become available in future. The Advance project will tackle this important problem by developing a new and advanced cost-directed hardware virtualisation technology to map programs onto emerging hardware architectures in a way that is both flexible and transparent to the programmer, but which, nevertheless, respects the programmers’ expectations and requirements on extra-functional properties, such as resource utilisation or power consumption. This interdisciplinary project will exploit leading work on computer architecture, probabilistic resource usage analysis, heuristic placement and mapping, programming languages and compilation methods to develop new cost-directed stream-processing models for parallel execution, and to apply these to commercial problems taken from a range of sectors: enterprise business software, image/voice/video processing, computational healthcare, etc.

The project partner SCCH organizes a developer camp at Liebenau, Upper Austria, from 14th to 21st September 2013. This camp will be visited by parallelization experts, master and PhD students, as well as industrial partners.

Beside some practical programming exercises this camp is meant to enable an intensive information exchange between interdisciplinary experts; resulting in a valuable output for the project ADVANCE (e.g., SAC-Eclipse-IDE, sac to C++ integration, etc.).

Finally, the outcomes of this camp will be used in future to, e.g., to demonstrate interested industrial companies the advantages of ADVANCE.

The project consists of several work technical packages (WP2-WP7):

• WP2: Application-Level Description of Performance Characteristics
• WP3: Hardware Virtualisation & Description
• WP4: Static Analysis for Resource Requirements
• WP5: Compilation Methods
• WP6: Runtime Resource Management
• WP7: Use Cases, Requirements and Evaluation

In addition the above work packages includes the following non-technical focus areas are covered (WP1, WP8-WP9):

• WP8: Community Building
• WP9: Dissemination, Exploitation and Public Awareness
• WP10: Project Management and Monitoring

• School of Computer Science at University of Hertfordshire
• University of St Andrews
• The University of Twente and the research institute CTIT (Centre for Telematics and Information Technology)
• The University of Amsterdam
• Philips Healthcare
• Technion
• SAP
• BioID
• SCCH (software competence centre hagenberg)
• Heriot-Watt University

The SAC project
The S-Net project
The SVP project