Project celebrates conclusion with workshop

13th August 2014

CSEM

Staff Reporter

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Established in 2011 by a consortium of industries, universities and RTOs, CSEM's FlexTiles project is celebrating its completion with a workshop on September 1st 2014 in Munich. The FlexTiles project saw members of the consortium join forces to develop a programmable heterogeneous many-core platform, which could be reconfigured on the fly to meet advanced processing needs. The workshop will present results and offer hands-on experience.

Leveraging multi-core technology to develop energy-efficient, high performance systems is a major challenge in computing. This is critical for embedded systems with a very limited energy budget as well as for supercomputers in terms of sustainability. The efficient programming of multi-core architectures remains an unresolved issue and will be an ever greater challenge as we move towards many-core solutions with more than a thousand processor cores predicted by 2020. The FlexTiles project defines and develops an energy-efficient yet programmable heterogeneous many-core platform with self-adaptive capabilities.

FlexTiles is a 3D stacked chip with a many-core layer and a reconfigurable layer. This heterogeneity brings a high level of flexibility in adapting the architecture to the targeted application domain for performance and energy efficiency.

The many-core platform is associated with a virtualisation layer and a dedicated tool-flow to improve programming efficiency, reduce the impact on time to market and reduce the development cost by 20 to 50%. FlexTiles raises the accessibility of the many-core technology to industry – from SMEs to large companies – thanks to its programming efficiency and its ability to adapt to the targeted application using embedded reconfigurable technologies.

A virtualisation layer on top of a kernel hides the heterogeneity and the complexity of the many-core platform from its programmer and fine-tunes the mapping of an application at runtime. The virtualization layer provides self-adaptation capabilities by dynamic relocation of application tasks to software on the many-core layer (made up of general purpose and DSP processors) or to hardware on the reconfigurable layer. This self-adaptation is used to optimize load balancing, power consumption, hot spots and resilience to faulty modules.

The workshop will be held on September 1st 2014 within the International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, FPL2014, in Munich, Germany.