5th meeting (May 2009, Munich)

The meeting included several presentations (Simulation profiling by Univ. Aachen, Power modeling by Univ. Bologna, Design-Space exploration by Univ. Politecnia di Milano) and discussions on two topics: Finalization of the API strategy and the gap between high-performance and embedded simulation.

Finalization of the API strategy. Last year we had engaged a vivid debate about the main objectives of the cluster. This year, we have come to an agreement on the API approach. We have recruited a postdoc within the cluster (Zheng Li) who will be in charge of defining at least some APIs to interconnect several of the tools of the partners. That postdoc will travel around several groups in order to collect information on the most relevant tools and how to interconnect them.

Bridging the cultural gap. We have also considered that the methodology and knowledge gap between the high-performance computing and embedded systems communities is still large. Each community feels it is insufficiently aware of the work and methodology of the other community. These discrepancies make the communications difficult and is also a source of inefficiencies. For instance, both communities are developing techniques for fast simulation, though they are each largely unaware of the progress of each; for instance, sampling innovations in the high-performance community can be very profitable, but are largely unknown, in the embedded community; conversely, the virtual prototyping and transaction-level abstract modeling approach of the embedded community could be very useful for the fast simulation of many-cores, but research on the topic is still in infancy in the high-performance community; or the use of professional design tools such as Cadence or Synopsys which can provide accurate cost, performance and area estimates of novel designs.
So we have decided to bridge that gap in two ways: ensure a mix of presentations from both communities, and the postdoc will also report on the discrepancies between the communities as he travels to the different groups.

The introduction slides are attached.