Heterogeneous System Architecture

Foreword

We are at the dawn of the heterogeneous computing era. With virtually all applications being power-limited, all future computing platforms will likely embrace heterogeneity. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is one of the pioneers in heterogeneous supercomputing. Our Mt. Blanc project explored the use of low-power CPUs with high-throughput GPUs to address the power consumption challenges associated with the design of our future supercomputers. Throughout the project, we experienced many of the problems that the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is designed to solve.

This book explains how HSA addresses these problems. One such problem is the need to use specialized interfaces in order to program the GPUs in the Mt. Blanc system. ...