Scientific Programming 18 (2010) 1–33 1 DOI 10.3233/SPR-2009-0296 IOS Press State-of-the-art in heterogeneous computing Andre R. Brodtkorb a,∗, Christopher Dyken a, Trond R. Hagen a, Jon M. Hjelmervik a and Olaf O. Storaasli b a SINTEF ICT, Department of Applied Mathematics, Blindern, Oslo, Norway E-mails: {Andre.Brodtkorb, Christopher.Dyken, Trond.R.Hagen, Jon.M.Hjelmervik}@sintef.no b Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Future Technologies Group, Oak Ridge, TN, USA E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract. Node level heterogeneous architectures have become attractive during the last decade for several reasons: compared to traditional symmetric CPUs, they offer high peak performance and are energy and/or cost efficient. With the increase of fine-grained parallelism in high-performance computing, as well as the introduction of parallelism in workstations, there is an acute need for a good overview and understanding of these architectures. We give an overview of the state-of-the-art in heterogeneous computing, focusing on three commonly found architectures: the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, graphics processing units (GPUs), and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We present a review of hardware, available software tools, and an overview of state-of-the-art techniques and algorithms. Furthermore, we present a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the architectures, and give our view on the future of heterogeneous computing. Keywords: Power-efficient architectures, parallel computer architecture, stream or vector architectures, energy and power consumption, microprocessor performance 1. Introduction the speed of logic gates, making computers smaller and more power efficient. Noyce and Kilby indepen- The goal of this article is to provide an overview of dently invented the integrated circuit in 1958, leading node-level heterogeneous computing, including hard- to further reductions in power and space required for ware, software tools and state-of-the-art algorithms.