This is the home page of the CPC research group of Tampere University. The group's name in Finnish is Räätälöity rinnakkaislaskenta. CPC's main research focus is on design and programming methodologies of customized parallel computing platforms and real time implementations of challenging algorithms.
In addition to publications and theses listed here as academic contributions, CPC has also made major open source contributions in the field of portable and customized heterogeneous computing: The group has created OpenASIP and Portable Computing Language (pocl) which are being used widely as research platforms and even for product use cases. CPC also created the prototype HIPCL translation tool which evolved into chipStar, a portable CUDA/HIP implementation using open standards.
An algorithm domain with extreme computational demands that CPC has been very interested in the past years is real time ray tracing. A separate focus group was formed for finding algorithmic, parallel/heterogeneous implementation and custom hardware solutions for its challenges in 2015. The group's web pages are here.
Static multi-issue processors exploit instruction level parallelism efficiently thanks to the lack of dynamic hardware that schedules instructions during run time. However, their instruction stream energy consumption is significantly higher than that of their dynamic multi- or single-issue counterparts. Processor designers must choose between the benefits of static multi-issue capabilities and higher code density, but is it too much to ask for both? In our latest article, we introduce an energy-efficient dual-mode (RISC-V single-issue and an exposed datapath VLIW) architecture for leveraging instruction level parallelism statically when available in the program, without suffering from VLIW’s poor code density when there’s a lack of it. The flexibility of the architecture is utilized by a novel compilation method that can generate code for both instruction sets with fine-grained mode switching. Read more in the preprint.
Our Dutch colleague Maarten Molendijk from TU Eindhoven presented a co-authored paper "BrainTTA: A 28.6 TOPS/W Compiler Programmable Transport-Triggered NN SoC" in IEEE ICCD 2023. The publication was a result of successful collaboration work between our CPC group and PARSE/TUE where a programmable TTA/SIMD-based accelerator was designed for ultra low power AI inference on low precision use cases. The design was done using the OpenASIP tools with the design work conducted by Molendijk et al. Read more about it in the preprint. The presentation slides are available here.
Our doctoral researcher Topi Leppänen presented the paper "AFOCL: Portable OpenCL Programming of FPGAs via Automated Built-in Kernel Management" in NorCAS 2023. AFOCL allows FPGA device users to avoid vendor lock-in and separates the roles of software and FPGA engineer. Behind the curtain, the OpenCL implementation automatically selects IPs from a precompiled bitstream database and handles FPGA reconfiguration. Details in the paper.
Check out the video below of the final demonstrator for the CPSoSAware EU project. The work was a collaboration with the University of Peloponnese. The demonstrator features a nanodrone, which offloads processing to edge resources wirelessly using Pocl-R.
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