Dagenais, Michel (École Polytechnique de Montréal)

Purpose

The communication and computing infrastructure has evolved through the years, getting more efficient, sophisticated, integrated and networked. Newer mobile devices (including smart robots or autonomous cars) and servers often contain 8 or more cores in their central processing unit. These systems are based on heterogeneous processors, with efficient traditional central processing units, but also with co-processing units optimised for graphics (GPGPUs with thousands of cores), networking, signal processing or even for Machine Learning. These co-processing units are highly parallel and often contain over 8 billion logic elements (transistors) each. Adding to this complexity is the increasing reliance on virtualisation, which hides the specificities of the hardware, allowing an application to run on several different processor models, but makes the performance more difficult to analyse. _x000D_