Challenges and opportunities in research and education of heterogeneous many-core applications

Technological innovation, coupled with the affordability of digital systems, has revolutionised the industrial age of electronics. A growing number of electronic systems today typically integrate multiple interconnected cores with various other peripherals depending on the applications. Over the years, the dimensionality of these applications and their underlying hardware platforms have been increasing expansively. The applications are becoming more far-reaching, connected, pervasive and compute-intensive. The hardware platform design is also increasingly becoming more challenging due to their conflicting design trade-offs between power, performance and reliability. This is further exacerbated by additional maintainability and sustainability requirements, often with a short time-to-market needs. Such proliferation of applications and hardware systems design challenges are likely to affect and potentially define how we do research and impart education to current and future generations of electronic engineers. This paper highlights these key research and education challenges relevant in the era of heterogeneous many-core applications.