[Crib-list] Speaker: MIRIAM LEESER (Northeastern University) -- Computational Research in Boston Seminar -- Friday, 03/06/2009 -- 12:30 PM in Building 32, Room 144 (Stata Center)

[Shirley Entzminger]

		    COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON SEMINAR


DATE:		Friday, MARCH 6, 2009
TIME:		12:30 PM
LOCATION:	Building 32, Room 144 (Stata Center)

Pizza and beverages will be provided at 12:15 PM outside Room 32-144.


TITLE:		Vforce: Aiding the Productivity and Portability in 
		Reconfigurable Supercomputer Applications
		via Runtime Hardware Binding


SPEAKER:	MIRIAM LEESER  (Northeastern University)


ABSTRACT:

Recently there has been an explosion of new computer architectures that 
combine multiple CPUs with Special Purpose Processors (SPPs).  Examples of 
SPPs include Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Graphics Processing 
Units (GPUs) and the Cell Broadband Engine.  Powerful multicomputer 
platforms that combine SPPs and CPUs in a single hardware architecture 
promise tremendous performance benefits.  Applications that can run on any 
of these platforms, deliver performance and be easily ported to other 
platforms are highly desirable.  Traditional programming practices, 
however, intertwine application code with hardware specific code such that 
porting entails a significant rewrite of the application and reuse of code 
is difficult.

VSIPL++ for Reconfigurable Computing (Vforce) is a middleware framework 
that extends VSIPL++ (a C++ extension of the Vector, Signal, and Image 
Processing Library) to include support for special purpose processors 
(SPPs).  Vforce is an extensible framework that allows the same 
application code to run on different heterogeneous computing platforms.  
Vforce offers application-level portability, framework-level extensibility 
to new hardware, and system-level run time resource management.  In 
particular, Vforce supports very late binding of the application to a 
specific hardware platform such that binding does not occur until run 
time.

In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to VSIPL++ and to some 
commercially available heterogeneous multicomputers.  Then I will present 
the Vforce framework and explain how it supports the three goals of 
performance, productivity and portability.  I will present our experience 
using Vforce on different hardware platforms (including those with FPGAs 
and those with GPUs) as well as different applications.

Biography: 
--------- 

Miriam Leeser is a Professor at Northeastern University, Department of 
Electrical and Computer Engineering.  She received her BS degree in 
Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and Diploma and Ph.D. 
Degrees in Computer Science from Cambridge University in England.  After 
completion of her Ph.D., she joined the faculty of Cornell University, 
Department of Electrical Engineering as an Assistant Professor.  In 
January, 1996 she joined the faculty of Northeastern University, where she 
is head of the Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory and a member of the 
Computer Engineering research group and the Center for Communications and 
Digital Signal Processing.  In 1992 she received an NSF Young Investigator 
Award to conduct research into Floating Point Arithmetic. Her research 
interests include hardware description languages, programming paradigms 
for many core computers, computer arithmetic and reconfigurable computing 
for signal and image processing applications.  She is a senior member of 
the IEEE and of the ACM.

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