A Software Ecosystem to Support the Development of Domain-specific Applications on Heterogeneous Architectures

The rise of heterogeneous computing architectures has significantly advanced the capabilities of high-performance concurrent applications. However, the design of applications for these architectures requires ICT application experts to have a deep understanding of hardware aspects and often their related optimisation strategies. As a consequence, the effort in the development phase is strongly influenced by intricate technical hindrances rather than focusing on domain-specific issues. This work presents Domain, a software ecosystem that supports ICT experts in taming the complexity of modern hardware architectures. Specifically, Domain identifies a comprehensive socio-technical environment where classes of stakeholders cooperate in order to support the development of software applications for heterogeneous computing environments. Also, Domain proposes families of software assets that promote the adoption of domain-specific notations, their automatic refinement up to the generation of hardware-specific binaries, and the optimised execution of such binaries on the target hardware resources