Up to 70 percent resource saving

Thanks to the European project REPARA, closing on 31st August, the resource demand of parallel computing—where along with the CPU, the GPU and other target devices also take part in performing computing tasks—may decrease with up to 70 percent.
Heterogeneous computing systems combine various processing elements with different characteristics that share a single memory system. These systems increase, often even multiply the computing performance of the normally multicore CPU with the performance of the graphic cards and other components. To be able to programme these, however, the original source code executable only by the CPU has to be transformed, which require specific engineering skills and enormous amount of work, and there were only a few situations and issues where it proved to be economical. The development finished recently and the resulting new development tool makes this work easier and partly automated. Some of the solutions created will be open source and freely available, while the complex engineering service built on them will be available on a market basis.
“We hope to help transform source code so that it can be run in heterogeneous parallel platforms with multiple graphic cards and reconfigurable hardware,” explains the project’s coordinator, José Daniel García, an associate professor at the project leader, the Computer Science Department of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). “With our newly developed tool, we’ve made significant results in improving both performance and energy efficiency. These are comparable to the improvements that can be achieved with a manual development process; the difference is that sometimes the latter method needs months of engineering, while the semiautomatic process we developed can do the same tasks in a few days.” Improving the efficiency of computation tasks can be applied to a variety of sectors, such as health (protein docking prediction), transportation (monitoring of railways systems), robotics (stereoscopic vision and navigation), and industry (analysis of defects in parts manufacturing).
The project has a budget of 3.6 million Euros, over 2.6 million of which is provided by the European Union from the FP7 Framework Programme. The three-year international project named REPARA (Reengineering and Enabling Performance And poweR of Applications) is led by the Spanish UC3M.
Other participants of the group involved in the research: HSR Rapperswil (Switzerland), University of Pisa (Italy), University of Szeged (Hungary), Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), and University of Turin (Italy). Partners from the industrial sector: Spanish Ixion Industry & Aerospace and Hungarian Evopro Innovation Kft.
REPARA project website: www.repara-project.eu