Abstract:
Across all safety critical systems domains, like the automotive, avionics, space and medical, there is a constantly increasing need for high performance, which cannot be provided with the traditional simple architectures used in these systems. Two promising technologies for higher performance in these domains are the use of embedded GPUs and the endless possibilities offered by the RISC-V hardware movement. However, due to the critical nature of these systems, this increase in performance must be provided without sacrificing the safety of the system. In my talk, I'm going to present an overview of software and hardware solutions, addressing the challenges introduced by integrating these new technologies in future safety critical systems. In particular, I will focus on the programmability and certification challenges introduced by the GPU programming models and I will introduce Brook Auto, an open-source, industry proven technology, recently awarded with a HiPEAC Technology Transfer Award. I will also highlight the work performed in the GPU4S (GPU for Space) ESA-funded project and the recent developments of safety-critical features in open-source RISC-V cores in UPC and BSC.

Bio:
Dr. Leonidas Kosmidis is a Senior Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and faculty member at the Faculty of Informatics (FIB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). He holds a PhD and an MSc in Computer Architecture from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a BSc in Computer Science from University of Crete with valedictorian.

His PhD thesis has been awarded with an Honourable Mention for the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award 2018, which is awarded to the best dissertation in the area of systems in Europe and has been the basis of the successful FP7 PROARTIS and PROXIMA projects with his hardware proposals successfully transferred to industry through the LEON3 Probabilistic Platform.

In 2013 he interned at the Media Processing Department of ARM Holdings at Cambridge, working on performance tuning and OpenCL code generation improvement of the Mali T6xx family of mobile GPUs, supported by a HiPEAC Industrial Internship Grant.

Dr. Kosmidis has participated in several European and ESA-funded projects, including the FP7 project PROXIMA, where he was the technical leader of software randomisation activities. He is currently leading the embedded accelerator (GPU and FPGA) system software activities for critical systems in the CAOS group and he is the PI of an Intel Hardware Accelerator Research Program (HARP) v2 project and the co-coordinator of the GPU4S (GPU for Space) ESA funded project. Dr. Kosmidis is the recipient of the RISC-V Educator of the Year Award 2019.