Toward Transparent Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract: Heterogeneous parallel systems are widely spread nowadays. Despite their availability, their usage and adoption are still limited, and even more rarely they are used to full power. Indeed, compelling new technologies are constantly developed and keep changing the technological landscape, but each of them targets a limited sub-set of supported devices, and nearly all of them require new programming paradigms and specific toolsets. Software, however, can hardly keep the pace with the growing number of computational capabilities, and developers are less and less motivated in learning skills that could quickly become obsolete. In this paper we present our effort in the direction of a transparent system optimization based on automatic code profiling and Just-In-Time compilation, that resulted in a fully-working embedded prototype capable of dynamically detect computing-intensive code blocks and automatically dispatch them to different computation units. Experimental results show that our system allows gains up to 32x in performance --- after an initial warm-up phase --- without requiring any human intervention.