Self-adaptive Hardware Acceleration on a Heterogeneous Cluster

Building a cluster of computers is a common technique to significantly improve the throughput of computationally intensive applications. Communication networks connect hundreds to thousands of compute nodes to form a cluster system, where a parallelisable application workload is distributed into the compute nodes. Theoretically, heterogeneous clusters with various types of processing units are more efficient than homogeneous clusters, since some types of processing units perform better than others on certain applications. A heterogeneous cluster can achieve better cluster performance by adapting cluster configurations to assign applications to processing elements that fit well with the applications. In this chapter we describe how to build a heterogeneous cluster that can adapt to application requirements. Section 9.1 provides an overview of heterogeneous computing. Section 9.2 presents the commonly used hardware and software architectures of heterogeneous clusters. Section 9.3 discusses the use of self-awareness and self-adaptivity in two runtime scenarios of a heterogeneous cluster, and Section 9.4 presents the experimental results. Finally, Section 9.5 discusses approaches to formally verify the developed applications.