This Shonan seminar will bring together a mix of practitioners and researchers from industry and academia to discuss the latest advances and challenges in heterogeneous computing. With increasingly diminishing returns in power and performance due to the slowing of Dennard scaling and Moore’s law, the heterogeneous computing community is faced with a demanding set of challenges:

• provide increasing compute performance,
• while improving energy efficiency,
• without burdening programmers with additional complexity.

Solutions to these problems increasingly rely on interdisciplinary research and hardware/software co-design to specialize the hardware and software stack for a particular problem or application domain. Examples of recent projects are Microsoft’s Catapult datacenter accelerator which is used in production to accelerate Bing ranking and Azure networking on a cloud of reprogrammable FPGAs, Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) — a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed to accelerate machine learning, and Amazon’s Annapurna ASIC used to accelerate network management in Amazon datacenters.

Over the course of this seminar, attendees will participate in discussions on the latest topics and trends in heterogeneous computing. We plan to hold sessions covering hardware and computer architecture, development tools, operating systems and runtimes, programming models, and application workloads. These sessions will include a mix of talks and open discussions led by experts in their related areas. There will be ample opportunity for one on one interaction in this intimate format which we expect will allow attendees to develop new connections and research directions for future collaborations.