A central area of ICT, high-performance computing (HPC) is expected to play an essential role for many of the challenges identified by Horizon 2020. An inherent challenge of future HPC is the increasing complexity of the underlying heterogeneous platforms. In particular, during the very recent years many innovative companies have introduced FPGA-based HPC platforms, proved to be very effective in a large range of applications, e.g. medical image processing, bioinformatics, genomics research, etc. Unfortunately, programming these platforms requires highly-skilled hardware designers, thus excluding typical HPC users: scientists, researches, engineers. An essential objective of HtComp is to bring the development of heterogeneous computing applications within the expertise of general parallel programmers possibly coming from any field, including scientific computing and engineering. HtComp will introduce innovative design flows for next-generation heterogeneous HPC platforms creating an easily accessible entry-point to the development of parallel applications based on FPGA hardware accelerators paired with multi-core CPUs and GPUs. The results achieved by HtComp will benefit scientists, research and medical institutions, engineers and companies from all disciplines where computational thinking and parallel programming are needed to use pervasive, heterogeneous high-performance computing hardware to achieve breakthroughs. The HtComp will rely on a rich range of competences covered by the proponents, coming from the industry, the HPC domain, and the academia. Several application fields will be addressed to evaluate the solutions developed, e.g. bioinformatics, cryptanalysis, computational chemistry, computational finance. Nevertheless, as a central objective, HtComp will also solicit further case-studies from real-world applications, in order to demonstrate on-the-field the new paths introduced by the project to tomorrow's heterogeneous computing platforms

  HtComp: Long-term vision and impact

In an ideal, long-term scenario enabled by HComp, a large and diverse community of users will be enabled to access the full spectrum of heterogeneous high-performance computing resources, possibly through distributed, cloud-based infrastructures. In particular, the results achieved by HtComp will benefit scientists, research and medical institutions, engineers and companies from all disciplines where computational thinking and parallel programming skills are needed to use pervasive, heterogeneous terascale computing hardware to achieve breakthroughs. These users will be provided with tools allowing them to fully harness the potential of the heterogeneous resources, including accelerators and special-purpose hardware, through a plain development cycle that completely abstracts away the underlying architectures. The uniform model exposed to the programmers will constitute a key enabling factor allowing general, non-expert users to access heterogeneous HPC services supplied through a distributed, loosely-coupled, cloud-based infrastructure.