Luca Carloni (Columbia): ESP: An Open-Source Platform for Heterogeneous Computing

Information technology has entered the age of heterogeneous computing.  Across a variety of application domains, computing systems rely on highly heterogeneous architectures that combine multiple general-purpose processors with specialized hardware accelerators.  The complexity of these systems, however, threatens to widen the gap between the capabilities provided by semiconductor technologies and the productivity of computer engineers. 

Embedded Scalable Platforms (ESP) is a new approach to the design and programming of heterogeneous computing systems that raises the level of abstraction in the design process. ESP is an open-source research platform for heterogeneous SoC design that combines a scalable tile-based architecture and a flexible system-level design methodology. Conceived as a heterogeneous integration platform and tested through years of teaching at Columbia University, ESP is naturally suited to foster collaborative engineering of SoC designs across the open-source community. 

Luca Carloni is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York.  He holds a Laurea Degree Summa cum Laude in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.  His research interests include heterogeneous computing, system-on-chip platforms, and embedded systems.  He coauthored over one hundred and fifty refereed papers. Luca received the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the ONR Young Investigator Award. He is an IEEE Fellow.