Multi-Partner Project: Outcomes of the ICSC Flagship 2 Project on Architectures and Design Methodologies to Accelerate AI Workloads

Energy-efficient hardware accelerators specialized for AI tasks are now being deployed from low-power edge devices to large-scale high-performance computing systems and data centers. This paper presents the main outcomes of the Flagship 2 project of the ICSC Italian National Research Center for High Performance Computing, which focuses on the design techniques for heterogeneous hardware optimized for AI acceleration from the edge to the HPC. In particular, we describe the main challenges addressed and highlight some advances in architectures, technologies, and design methodologies tailored to accelerate deep learning, transformer-based, and generative AI models. We also summarize the most significant outcomes achieved through the close collaboration among the project partners, including the development of design techniques, tools, prototypes, IP cores, and models that collectively advance AI acceleration from the edge to the HPC contexts.