Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Accelerated Computing

The papers in this special section focus on the accelerated computing which refers to a computing model wherein some/all of the computation of an application is carried out on specialized hardware (known as an accelerator) in tandem with the traditional CPU. Accelerators are highly specialized hardware components that can execute a specific functionality at high performance and lower power, and often, even higher reliability than is possible on a traditional CPU. The demand of ever more computation and ever-higher power-efficiency of computation (Watts per Mflops) plus the brakes on Dennard scaling have brought the paradigm of Accelerated Computing to the front and center of computer architecture and computing system design.