Project ADVANCE » Focus Areas

Focus Areas

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

WP2: Application-Level Description of Performance Characteristics

The goal of this work package is to develop language extensions, annotations and tools to capture performance infor- mation for software components and systems. The annotations must capture throughput, latency and jitter metrics for software systems targeting heterogenous multi-core systems, extrapolating these metrics in a statistically-valid manner from information on components to information on complete systems.

WP3: Hardware Virtualisation & Description

The goal of this work package is, by providing a virtualisation layer on top of various hardware targets, to support a write once deploy anywhere approach to concurrent programming in Advance. The interface to this concurrent virtual machine will be based on the SVP model (developed in the the ÆTHER project) using the SL1 language as an interface. The latter was defined in the Apple-CORE project as a common compiler target language for the several implementations of SVP. These include: a translation to the language μTC and its compilation using a version of GCC to the Apple-CORE many-core micro-grid; a translation to sequential C; and a translation to a pthread implementation of SVP being used for the demonstrators in the ÆTHER project. This requires a new and more efficient software implementation of SVP that supports the granularisation of a program to that matching a given target, as this is not currently supported by the ÆTHER implementation, which is also quite inefficient. There are also strong links between various work packages, which use this interface to support a spectrum of mapping strategies, from a static analysis, where the target is known at compile time, through to a solution to the more general problem of a dynamic, multilevel distributed resource allocation.

WP4: Static Analysis for Resource Requirements

The goal of this work package is to develop resource usage models and analyses that can be used to accurately predict execution time for VR-Net programs in terms of statistically valid throughput, latency and jitter metrics. The models and analyses must reflect on both user-supplied information, and on feedback from lower levels of the execution chain, including concrete hardware resources. They must be capable of producing statistically-valid resource usage information for heterogeneous multi-core/many-core architectures.

WP5: Compilation Methods

The goal of this work package is to develop compilation techniques that make effective use both of the static cost analysis developed in other work packages and of dynamic feedback on program execution parameters from the hardware virtualisation layer.

WP6: Runtime Resource Management

The goal of this work package is to design the interface between the previous levels in the tool chain and the chosen (often heterogeneous) multi-core hardware platform. That includes the choice of the (near) optimal hardware from a set of hardware platforms, the dynamic (re- )placement of software modules on resources, and the observation of run-time performance of the resulting system.

WP7: Use Cases, Requirements and Evaluation

The goal of this work package is to evaluate the models and techniques that have been developed in the technical work packages using a set of reference applications. This work package will ensure that end-user perspectives will be incorporated into the design, validation and evaluation of developments in the Advance project. This involves (i) providing requirements and use cases for the technical work packges, (ii) executing experiments and evaluations based on real world applications from different sectors and (iii) performing research on the implications and opportunities the Advance architecture and its interfaces is offering to the applications.

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