Heterogeneous Computing: Hardware and Software Perspectives

If you look around you will find that all computer systems, from your portable devices to the strongest supercomputers, are heterogeneous in nature.

The most obvious heterogeneity is the existence of computing nodes of different capabilities (e.g. multicore, GPUs, FPGAs, ...). But there are also other heterogeneity factors that exist in computing systems, like the memory system components, interconnection, etc. The main reason for these different types of heterogeneity is to have good performance with power efficiency.

Heterogeneous computing results in both challenges and opportunities. This book discusses both. It shows that we need to deal with these challenges at all levels of the computing stack: from algorithms all the way to process technology. We discuss the topic of heterogeneous computing from different angles: hardware challenges, current hardware state-of-the-art, software issues, how to make the best use of the current heterogeneous systems, and what lies ahead.

The aim of this book is to introduce the big picture of heterogeneous computing. Whether you are a hardware designer or a software developer, you need to know how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The main goal is to bring researchers and engineers to the forefront of the research frontier in the new era that started a few years ago and is expected to continue for decades. We believe that academics, researchers, practitioners, and students will benefit from this book and will be prepared to tackle the big wave of heterogeneous computing that is here to stay.

Mohamed Zahran received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2003. He is currently a faculty member with the Computer Science Department, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU). His research interest spans several aspects of computer architecture, such as architecture of heterogeneous systems, hardware/software interaction, and Exascale computing. Zahran is a senior member of IEEE, a senior member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi Scientific Honor Society. Besides research and teaching, he is also interested in the history and philosophy of science and used to be a good chess player!