COMPUTER 42 COVER FE ATURE

In recent years, several computational resource types have matured to the point that they can materially benefit high-performance applications. These resources include multicore general-purpose processors, reconfigurable hardware, graphics processors, digital signal processors, and other application-specific processors. In many cases, the performance gains associated with these specialized computational resources are quite significant, and perfor-mance improvements of one to two orders of magnitude have been reported.3,4 Systems built out of these resources are architecturally diverse, and while constructing hardware prototypes that include diverse compute resources is straightforward, ap-plication development for such systems is quite difficult for several reasons