Conference Attendance HiPEAC - Day 1 - MULTIPROG

It is once again, conference time.  For North Americans, this might seem rather early as I am writing from Prague, Czech Republic (or at least when I started 12 hours ago).  I am attending HiPEAC, which is the premier European computer architecture conference.  HiPEAC is a dual-track conference.  Throughout the three days there is the paper-track, where the accepted papers to TACO (such as mine) are presented.  And simultaneously there are workshops.  For the first day, I am starting with the MULTIPROG workshop, which is on Programmability and Architectures for Heterogeneous Multicores.

Let's start with the keynote, given by David Kaeli of Northeastern University.
- Concurrent execution of compute kernels
- Scheduling of kernels, deadlines
- Sharing / access to host memory (i.e., RAM)

The current model of using a GPGPU is that it runs 1 computation kernel; however, there are many problems that would better decompose into several separate kernels.  It would also be valuable if there were further examples of these problems (i.e., benchmarks).  Now, whenever you try running multiple anything on a computational resource, there is a runtime scheduling problem.  Which should run to best complete the overall problem.  A follow-on research question explores this question a cloud-based environment where the GPU may be shared across entirely independent compute kernels.  This requires the kernels to be tagged with IDs to ensure that their memory is kept separate.  All of this sounds as if we need an OS for the GPU.

Following the late-morning break, we heard next from MECCA (MEeting the Challenges in Computer Architecture) - 3Ps: parallelism, power, and performance.  Consider parallel program annotations for describing the concurrency, runtime management of caches using the annotations to indicate the flow of data and transfer the data before it is required and with the appropriate coherence states and indicate when a block is dead and can be evicted from the cache.

Then there was lunch, resting from my flights, then networking, especially the part where I stood by my poster and discussed my research for 3 hours.  Now to rest for day 2.