Keynote I: “Designing heterogeneous systems in the AI era: Challenges and opportunities”

Artificial Intelligence has recently become a major trend, driving the rapid development of new compute capabilities. As AI functionality has improved, the demand for even greater capabilities has grown, requiring significantly higher levels of performance and energy-efficiency in the IT infrastructure. The maturation of classical semiconductor scaling has made delivering these higher levels much more challenging; reliance on scaling alone is insufficient. As a result, innovations in design, design automation, and architecture are crucial to improving power-performance. Accelerators in heterogeneous systems will increasingly be needed to improve overall system capabilities and power/performance. To enable practical accelerator integration, system architectures must be designed to easily incorporate heterogeneous components such as today's GPUs, as well as future accelerators for cognitive applications. Design processes must increase in efficiency to enable the cost-effective design of application-specific accelerators. In this presentation, I will describe these trends, some exemplary innovations that address them, and areas of future research towards heterogeneous systems for the AI era.