“Architecting the future through heterogeneous computing”

Abstract

Anyone wishing to drive advances in computing technology must carefully negotiate key trade-offs. First, reducing power consumption is increasingly critical. Consumers want improved battery life, size, and weight for their laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Likewise, data-center power demands and cooling costs continue to rise. Concurrent is the demand for improved performance that enables compelling new user experiences. Users want to access devices through more natural interfaces (speech and gesture); they also want devices to manage ever-expanding volumes of data (home movies, pictures, and a world of content available in the cloud). An essential part of making these new user experiences available is programmer productivity; software developers must easily be able to tap into new capabilities by using familiar, powerful programming models. Finally, it is increasingly important that software be supported across a broad spectrum of devices; developers cannot sustain today's trend of re-writing code for an ever expanding number of different platforms.