VINEYARD: Versatile Integrated Accelerator-Based Heterogeneous Data Centres

VINEYARD is a H2020 project that aims to develop an integrated platform for energy-efficient data centres based on new servers with novel, coarse-grain and fine-grain, programmable hardware accelerators. It will, also, build a high-level programming framework for allowing end-users to seamlessly utilize these accelerators in heterogeneous computing systems by using typical data-centre programming frameworks (e.g. Storm, Spark, etc.).

VINEYARD will develop two types of energy-efficient servers integrating two novel hardware accelerator types: coarse-grain programmable dataflow engines and fine-grain all-programmable FPGAs that accommodate multiple processor cores. The former will be suitable for data centre applications that can be represented in dataflow graphs while the latter will be used for accelerating applications that need tight communication between the processor and the hardware accelerators.

VINEYARD will additionally develop a new programming framework and the required system software to hide the programming complexity of the resulting heterogeneous system based on the hardware accelerators. This programming framework will also allow the hardware accelerators to be swapped in and out of the heterogeneous infrastructure so as to offer efficient energy use. VINEYARD will foster the expansion of the soft-IP cores industry, currently limited in the embedded systems, to in data centre market.The VINEYARD consortium has strong industrial foundations, and covers the whole value chain in the datacentre ecosystem; from the data-centre vendors up to the data-centre application programmers. VINEYARD plans to demonstrate the advantages of its approach in three real use-cases:

1. a bioinformatics application for high-accuracy brain modelling,
2. two critical financial applications and 
3. a big data analytics application.

Project Coordinator: Prof. Dimitrios Soudris, ICCS, GR
Technical Project Management: Dr. Christoforos Kachris, ICCS, GR
Start date: February 1st, 2016
Duration: 36 months
Website: www.vineyard-h2020.eu

Partners:
1. Institute of Computer and Communications, GR
2. Maxeler Technologies, UK
3. Bull Systems, FR
4. Queen’s University of Belfast, UK
5. Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, GR
6. Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK
7. Neurasmus BV, NL
8. Neurocom Luxembourg SA, LU
9. Hellenic Exchanges SA, GR
10. LeanXcale, ES
11. Globaz, PT

VINEYARD is a project co-funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union under Grant Agreement no 687628