Tutorial: A Novel Runtime Environment for Accelerator-Rich Heterogeneous Architectures

Abstract

As the landscape of computing advances, system designers are increasingly exploring methodologies that leverage higher levels of heterogeneity to enhance performance within constrained size, weight, power, and cost parameters. CEDR (Compiler-integrated Extensible DSSoC Runtime) stands as an ecosystem facilitating productive and efficient application development and deployment across heterogeneous computing systems. It fosters the co-design of applications, scheduling heuristics, and accelerators within a unified framework. Our goal is to present CEDR as a promising environment for lifting the barriers to research on heterogeneous systems and addressing the broader challenges within domain-specific architectures. We introduce CEDR and discuss the evolutionary design decisions underlying its programming model. Subsequently, we explore its utility for a broad range of users through design sweeps on off-the-shelf heterogeneous platforms across scheduling heuristics, hardware compositions, and workload scenarios.