INRIA Large Scale Initiative on Multicore
Large scale multicore virtualization for performance scaling and portability
Overview
Multicore processors are becoming the norm in most computing systems. However supporting them in an efficient way is still a scientific challenge. This large-scale initiative introduces a novel approach based on virtualization and dynamicity, in order to mask hardware heterogeneity, and to let performance scale with the number and nature of cores. It aims to build collaborative virtualization mechanisms that achieve essential tasks related to parallel execution and data management. We want to unify the analysis and transformation processes of programs and accompanying data into one unique virtual machine. We hope delivering a solution for compute-intensive applications running on general-purpose standard computers.
Research directions
- Memory management and scheduling
- Garbage collection
- Improving data locality
- Dynamic parallelization
- Fast execution of Sequential Sections
- Dynamic Code Generation
- Dynamic Binary Rewriting for Performance Portability
- Virtualization of floating-point computation
- Convergence between VMKit and StarPU
