Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) Foundation Names Tampere University of Technology an HSA Academic Center of Excellence

BEAVERTON, OR, March 14, 2017 – The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation continues to expand its Academic Partnership Program with the addition of Finland-based Tampere University of Technology (TUT) as an HSA Academic Center of Excellence. TUT is in Tampere, about 170 km (105 miles) north of Helsinki.

TUT is now the third European university accorded this distinction – in December, the Foundation announced that Technische Universitaet (TU) Darmstadt, and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU), both in Germany, were named Academic Centers of Excellence; Northeastern University was the first in North America.

HSA is a standardized platform design that unlocks the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in most modern electronic devices. It allows developers to easily and efficiently apply the hardware resources—including CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs, fabrics and fixed function accelerators—in today's complex systems-on-chip (SoCs).

"We're excited to have TUT on board as an Academic Center of Excellence and look forward to collaborating with the university on several projects," said HSA Foundation President Dr. John Glossner. "TUT is the forefront of research in areas that intersect closely with heterogeneous computing such as intelligent machines and networked systems."

"The HSA ecosystem is growing rapidly not only in Finland, but throughout Europe," said HSA Foundation Chairman and Managing Director Greg Stoner. "TUT has a long-established reputation encompassing an array of innovative technologies. Our members – and the global tech community - will benefit greatly from this burgeoning partnership."

Jarmo Takala, a professor in the TUT Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering, added that the research group is currently working on an open source implementation of the OpenCL standard, called the Portable Computing Language project.

"We're also going to add support for HSA specs and create a complete tool flow for HSA runtime customized accelerators based on transport-triggered architecture, and open source design tools for these processors, known as the "TTA-based Co-Design Environment" added Takala.

Dr. Pekka Jääskeläinen, who is currently working at TUT as a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Academy of Finland and also involved in various HSA- related activities, said adopting HSA standards "is enabling us to build well-documented IP interfaces to SoC components. HSA is also providing a framework for more studies related to programmer-productivity challenges still hindering heterogeneous platform adoption."

About TUT

Established in 1965 as a subsidiary of Helsinki University of Technology, TUT became an independent university in 1972. Today, more than 8,300 undergraduate and postgraduate students attend TUT. Of these, about 1,500 students from more than 60 countries are currently pursuing studies. TUT is a sought-after partner for collaborative research and development projects with business and industry worldwide.

About the HSA Foundation

The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a non-profit consortium of SoC IP vendors, OEMs, Academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs, whose goal is making programming for parallel computing easy and pervasive. HSA members are building a heterogeneous computing ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, which combines scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU, while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance with low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation using CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, while supporting a diverse set of high-level programming languages, and creating the foundation for next-generation, general-purpose computing.

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