Project “Versatile Integrated Accelerator-based Heterogeneous Data Centers” (VINEYARD) developed an integrated platform for energy-efficient data centers based on new servers with novel, coarse-grain and fine-grain, programmable hardware accelerators. It also built a high-level programming framework for allowing end-users to seamlessly utilize these accelerators in heterogeneous computing systems by using typical data-center programming frameworks (e.g. MapReduce, Storm, Spark, etc.).

VINEYARD developed 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 ARM cores. The former is suitable for data center applications that can be represented in dataflow graphs while the latter is used for accelerating applications that need tight communication between the processor and the hardware accelerators. Both types of programmable accelerators get customized based on application requirements, resulting in higher performance and significantly reduced energy budgets.

VINEYARD additionally developed 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 also allows the hardware accelerators to be swapped in and out of the heterogeneous infrastructure so as to offer efficient energy use. VINEYARD fostered the expansion of the soft-IP cores industry, currently limited in the embedded systems, to in data center market.

The VINEYARD consortium has strong industrial foundations, and covers the whole value chain in the data-center ecosystem; from the data-center vendors up to the data-center application programmers. VINEYARD demonstrated the advantages of its approach in three real use-cases a) a bioinformatics application for high-accuracy brain modelling, b) two critical financial applications and c) a big-data analysis application.