runwh

RunWH, short for Run With Hardware, is a hypothetical protocol and software library designed to abstract access to heterogeneous hardware accelerators in computing systems. It provides a uniform API for submitting compute tasks, negotiating resources, scheduling execution, and retrieving results across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. The project aims to detach application logic from vendor-specific runtimes and enable portable acceleration.

Origin and scope: The term RunWH appears in speculative computing literature in the 2010s as part of discussions about portable accelerator interfaces. While real-world efforts address similar goals (OpenCL, SYCL, and various task runners), RunWH is described as a neutral layer above vendor stacks.

Architecture: A RunWH deployment comprises a central orchestrator and client libraries in languages such as C++, Python, and Rust. Backend drivers enable execution on different hardware backends. Tasks are expressed as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with metadata describing memory, compute types, and data transfers. The orchestrator handles resource negotiation, data movement, and fault isolation, presenting a consistent API to applications.

Usage and status: In theory, RunWH would simplify porting workloads to new accelerators and improve multi-vendor interoperability. In practice, no formal standard has gained universal adoption, and most projects rely on vendor-specific runtimes or higher-level orchestration frameworks. The concept remains of interest in academic and experimental contexts.

See also: Heterogeneous computing, accelerator abstraction, task-based parallelism, OpenCL, SYCL.