Title: A Brief Overview of HW/SW Co-Design for Embedded Systems – Is it relevant to high performance computing?

Speaker: Sharon Hu, University of Notre Dame

Date/Time:  Friday, March 5, 2010, 9:00 – 10:00 am       

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: Hardware/software co-design refers to the methodologies, tools, and practices that support the integration of hardware and software components during embedded system design and development.  In the last 15 years, tremendous progress has been achieved in this area of research, which has lead to the birth of new languages, new CAD tools, new companies, etc. The integrated design concept has brought new thinking to many aspects of computer system design including process scheduling, communication protocols, memory management, software development, as well as design of application-specific processors and reconfigurable architectures.

This talk first presents a high-level overview of the HW/SW co-design area and touch on the "whys", "whats", and "hows" of HW/SW co-design for embedded systems. It then briefly summarizes the current challenges and trends in this area. Finally, the talk examines similarities and differences between embedded computing and high performance computing and discusses what aspects of HW/SW co-design may be useful to designing high performance computing systems.

CSRI POC: Richard Murphy, (505) 844-7122