by Dr. Vincent Natoli, President and Founder, Stone Ridge Technology
Heterogeneous processing or co-processing on chips other than the CPU is the most recent trend in HPC. To some extent there has always been a small fringe element pursuing this direction, but as recently as a few years ago, a colleague claiming to be coding a GPU for physics or chemistry calculations would have been politely avoided. Programming FPGAs in strange hardware languages was even more far-fetched.
In the past few years, however, there has been a rich diversity of efforts and support from major HPC vendors. This year brings at least two conferences focused on heterogeneous computing: The Symposium on Application Accelerators in HPC (SAAHPC09, U. Illinois-Urbana, July 28-30) and the CECAM workshop “Algorithmic Re-Engineering for Modern Non-Conventional Processing Units” (Lugano, Sept. 30-Oct. 2). Several other meetings are dedicated to one type or another of specific co-processing approaches.
