Mobile heterogeneous computing: a software perspective

Mobile heterogeneous computing, materialized in the form of multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoC) comprising of various processing elements such as general-purpose cores with differing characteristics, GPUs, DSPs, non-programmable accelerators, and reconfigurable computing, are expected to dominate the current and the future mobile platform landscape. The heterogeneity enables a computational kernel with specific requirements to be paired with the processing element(s) ideally suited to perform that computation, leading to substantially improved performance and energy-efficiency. While heterogeneous computing is an attractive proposition in theory, considerable software support at all levels is essential to fully realize its promises. The system software needs to orchestrate the different on-chip compute resources in a synergistic manner with minimal engagement from the application developers. The current state-of-the-art is inadequate in the software dimension despite tremendous progress and success in designing heterogeneous MPSoCs for mobile devices. This talk will put the spotlight on the software perspective of mobile heterogeneous computing, especially in the context of popular emerging applications, such as 3D gaming, multimedia processing and analytics. The talk will introduce the technology trends driving the mobile heterogeneous computing revolution, provide an overview of computationally and performance divergent compute elements, and present efforts at compiler and run-time management layers to unleash its potential towards high-performance energy-efficient computing.