These are the already put in place working groups to support the definition of the reference architecture proposed by the Heterogeneity Alliance.

Each WG corresponds to one of the layers identified in the architecture and each group is working in detailing the specifications and requirements that each layer should fulfill.

Each WG is defining their objectives, scope and boundaries with other WGs, as well as identifying the current assets, tools and results that could map into its boundaries, creating a taxonomy of tools that can be reused by anyone who would like to develop an application by considering the heterogeneity aspects.

In next future, more WGs will be set up in order to apply the reference architecture to specific heterogeneous domains: embedded, HPC, cloud/edge or security.

IDE/SDK

Coordinator

Jorge Ejarque, BSC mail

Objectives

The aim of the IDE/SDK working group is the discussion about challenges, trends and best practices on design and develop applications for heterogeneous computing environments. The working group is working in the identification of the required features to facilitate the application design and development of applications.

Middleware

Coordinator

Karim Djemame, University of Leeds mail

Objectives

This WG interests are centred around the middleware requirements for applications operating in heterogeneous hardware environments. The main objective is to reason about the significance of the new directions that middleware is taking in heterogeneous computing environments and identify the paradigms that determine the requirements, capabilities and performance of middleware in such environments.

Runtime and systems

Coordinator

Lutz Schubert, University of Ulm mail

Objectives

This WG is responsible for checking that suggestions from the vertical WGs can be aligned to the hardware, has sensible resource management requirements etc. This layer tries to define a unifying interface and capabilities along the line of POSIX, but may suggest further domain specific interfaces, as well as an overarching OS architecture

Heterogeneous Architecture and Resource Management

Coordinator

Juan Fumero, University of Manchester mail

Objectives

This layer in the reference architecture refers to works and state-of-the-art projects involved in the Heterogeneity Alliance related to computer architecture of heterogeneous hardware. This includes new instruction set architectures (ISA), GPU, FPGA and custom designed computer architectures. Particularly we are interested in computer architecture that exploits data, task and pipeline parallelism.