Many important electronics applications, including medical imaging, cyber security and digital entertainment, require processing massive amount of data under limited time, power and price budgets. Modern many-core processor chips offer a promising platform for computing such data-intensive workloads, however, their utilization is hindered due to the inherent difficulty and unproductivity of parallel software development at scale.
The project aims to address this critical problem by developing methodologies and tools for productive and scalable development of software that would efficiently run on thousands of processor cores. Central to the approach is development of "functionally-consistent structurally-malleable streaming specification," which enables design-time exploration of a rich software implementation space, under the constraints of hardware platform, while maintaining the application's end-to-end functional behavior. The project results are expected to improve performance, energy consumption, and application development cost in a large number of data-driven disciplines, ranging from medical imaging and cyber security to multimedia and beyond.