Preface

Isn´t it the most exciting time ever to work on reconfigurable computing! This statement, although true during past decades when new breakthroughs in technology evolution were made, particularly is true today. To what other conclusion should one come considering the societal challenges we are facing in the context of sustainable energy generation and distribution, the transition towards a smarter and more ecological mobility, heath and ambient assisted living, digital security and communications infrastructure evolution. Each of these challenges goes hand in hand with tackling the so called data deluge problem and the demand for huge, exascale computing performance that is spread over mobile appliances and the Cloud. Sticking to compute platforms for a second, semiconductor industry today achieves integration of hundreds to thousands of processing elements or cores on a single chip. However, for thermal reasons one cannot run all cores simultaneously, leading to the phenomenon of dark silicon. Neither do generally applicable programming abstractions exist that let application developers efficiently utilize the vast amounts of parallel resources. Following the existing examples in the financial and networking sectors, the criticality of the above described challenges open up huge opportunities for heterogeneous, application-specific computing platforms to become best practice solutions in the respective industries. FPL has provably been a conference where newest advancements and breakthrough solutions in the field of heterogeneous, reconfigurable computing were introduced.