An Introduction to Accelerator and Parallel Programming

Computers are a means to an end. They allow us to have faster solutions to complex problems, provide the ability to store and retrieve information across the globe, provide the backbone for remarkable technologies like robotics and self-driving cars (sort of) and AI, and hopefully uplift the lives of everyone on the planet. As the problems to solve have become more complex, computer architecture, programming languages, and programming models have continued to evolve. This has led to the growth of hardware accelerators and domain-specific programming models. Professor David Patterson from UC Berkeley (the author of all the computer architecture books I had in college) has talked extensively about domain-specific architectures and accelerators.