Balanenko I. G., Galey A. S., Rusakova A. V.

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University

SEARCHING FOR FASTER, MORE EFFICIENT AND SUSTAINABLE PARALLEL COMPUTING

A European research project named REPARA and coordinated by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid is studying how to improve parallel computing applications to increase their performance and energy efficiency, as well as easing programming and source code maintenance. Parallel heterogeneous computing combines several processing elements with distinct characteristics that share a single memory system. Normally, multicore processors are used (such as those in some smart phones or personal computers), combined with graphic cards and other components to process large amounts of data. These computation tasks have applications in several domains such as healthcare (protein docking), transportation (monitoring of railway systems), robotics (stereoscopic vision and navigation), and industry (defects detection in manufactured parts).

The REPARA project’s main objective is to make these benefits available to users without the enormous development efforts that these complex architectures entail. Within REPARA project, whose name can be interpreted as «Refactoring for Parallelism» in allusion to the usage of source code refactoring, scientists are attempting to improve three basic properties: application performance (increasing execution speed), energy efficiency (reducing energy consumption) and the ease of source code maintenance and modification. Researchers expect to have prototypes of these new tools by February 2015, and test them in an evaluation phase together with their industrial partners. In a research paper recently published in the New Generation Computing journal, these researchers analyzed how programming models affect productivity and energy efficiency in the case of multicore processor architectures.

The REPARA (Reengineering and Enabling Performance and Power of Applications) project, which began in September 2013 and is expected to continue for three years, joins experts in heterogeneous parallel systems, from academia as well as from the industry, from five European countries.

The list of references:

1. Electronic resource. – Mode of access: http://www.ideal-ist.eu/ps-es-79021

2. Electronic resource. – Mode of access: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-faster-efficient-sustain