Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TANGO (Transparent heterogeneous hardware Architecture deployment for eNergy Gain in Operation)

Teaser

Heterogeneous parallel architectures have received considerable attention, as an efficient approach to run applications and deliver services, by combining different processor types in one system to improve absolute performance, minimise power consumption and/or lower cost. As...

Summary

Heterogeneous parallel architectures have received considerable attention, as an efficient approach to run applications and deliver services, by combining different processor types in one system to improve absolute performance, minimise power consumption and/or lower cost. As this range of applications continues to grow, there is an urgent need to design more flexible software abstractions and improved system architectures to fully exploit the benefits. TANGO mission is to provide a framework for the exploitation of heterogeneous parallel architectures that enables software designers to easily implement and verify applications running on such platforms. In order to meet the requirements,TANGO is proposing a 3-layer reference architecture to control and abstract underlying heterogeneous hardware architectures, configurations and software systems, while providing tools to optimize various dimensions of software design and operations. Thus, the TANGO Toolbox, a collection of tools which implement most of the building blocks in the reference architecture addressing the challenge of supporting the software developers in the design, development, deployment, operation and execution of applications in heterogeneous platforms. Addressing the heterogeneity challenge is complex enough to consider this adventure alone, so the TANGO project fostered the creation of the Heterogeneity Alliance which was able to gather all the interested projects and organizations to contribute to a common goal: find solutions to so many technical challenges that heterogeneity is bringing and nurture business and research opportunities around them.

Work performed

The project’s main results are:
- Three incremental versions of TANGO architecture were delivered. It shows a three layer architecture where all software components are identified to build up the proposed solution for managing the heterogeneity.
- Three incremental versions of the requirements, state of the art and market analysis were also produced so far.
- Three releases of software components have been publicly delivered and are available for external assessment by community.
- Three use cases, one for HPC at Bull and two ones from Deltatec (embedded and remote processing) have been set up and used for experiments, tests and validation of TANGO technology.
- Creation and coordination of the Heterogeneity Alliance, which already has 22 members and continuously growing, with other projects and organisations interested in similar solutions than TANGO, with the aim at creating a common critical mass of solutions, exchange information and collaborate in more ambitious solutions without overlapping. A dedicated web site, a catalogue of assets and the edition of a joint book are some of the main relevant results so far.
- The plans and actions for creating awareness and impact of the project were defined in early stages of the project and are continuously followed up through KPIs. Dissemination material and web portal have been created to support the dissemination actions.
- Six journal papers, ten conference papers, 2 books contributions, 4 academic courses, 7 organized workshops, 24 conference attended
- Four press articles, 19 trade events attended, 4 whitepapers produced, 5 press releases, 3-monthly newsletter
- One commercial video and 9 videos for demos
- Plan and implementation of the project sustainability by combining the individual exploitation plans of the partners (iterative vesions along the project), the construction of an Alliance and the open source delivery in a GitHub repository.-
- All the project templates, guidelines and procedures were put in place from the very beginning providing partners the necessary guidance for fulfilling the management processes.
- Quality and risk are being monitored from the start of the project. The required mechanisms and measures are being applied. Same for IPRs which have been collected from the beginning of the project to identify conflicts that could impact on delivery and exploitation.
- Project resources are being assessed every six months to ensure the effort and budget of the project are spent according to the project evolution.

Final results

TANGO impacts on both the IT industry and market; and the research community advancing future application development processes to a new stage in which the development process for parallel architectures will be simplified; will be abstracted from underlying architectures and hardware; and will enable tools to consider optimized control and self-adaptation thanks to various dimensions such as energy efficiency, performance, data movement and location, cost, time-criticality, security, dependability on target architectures.

The key novelty of the project has been the reference architecture and its implementation that will include the results of the research work into different optimisations areas.

TANGO includes a programming model with built-in support for various hardware architectures that abstracts the complexity of developing for multiple architectures, including heterogeneous clusters, heterogeneous chips and programmable logic devices. TANGO creates a new cross-layer programming approach for heterogeneous parallel hardware architectures featuring automatic deployment on different scenarios and code generation including software and hardware modelling.

Moreover, TANGO provides mechanisms that allow deployment and control of the heterogeneous parallel infrastructures, and simplifies the workflow at the same time. It automatically prepares the application to be executed into different heterogeneous architectures, deploying it, and monitoring its execution, self-adapting its configuration or usage of heterogeneous devices if necessary.

The most important outcomes of the project are released as Open Source under the efforts of the consortium to promote the TANGO Toolbox in our impact plans, but also taking advantage of Heterogeneity Alliance.
Therefore, in order for TANGO project to create impact we must cope with providing a solution to such problems. Also, the market analysis tells us that the impact of heterogeneity on all computing tasks is rapidly increasing, innovative architectures, algorithms, and specialized programming environments and tools are needed to efficiently use these new and mixed/diversified parallel architectures.

In this context, TANGO revolves around a powerful statement, our value proposition is as follows: “Simplify & Optimize Heterogeneity –Simplifying the way programmers approach the development of next generation applications.”

To do so, TANGO is focused on the technical side for providing impact to design more flexible software abstractions to fully exploit the benefits of these heterogeneous platforms, while addressing energy optimization at the same time.

Our impact plans revolve around the idea of initiating the leverage of very early stages of the tools and technologies that will be used to create applications using heterogeneous hardware. With this approach, it impacts on the tech and research communities providing advanced research to enable advancing future application development processes to a new stage in which the development process for parallel architectures are simplified, abstracted from the underlying architectures and hardware, and enable tools to consider optimized control and self-adaptation.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.tango-project.eu.