The HECO (High Efficiency COmputing) Group is a consolidated research and development team, hosted at UNIPAMPA (Federal University of Pampa), in the south of Brazil, interested on hardware and software aspects of systems developed to address general purpose and specific applications performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time (best performance and/or improved user experience) and effort (lowest cost, including best fit technology associated to reduced power consumption).

The HECO group was formed in 2008 tied to the Computer Engineering undergraduate course, at Campus Bagé, and is headed by Professors Bruno Silveira Neves and Leonardo Bidese de Pinho, who supervise researches developed by several Computer Engineering students in the following main subjects:

• software engineering metrics applied to multi-core systems
• cost-performance analysis of general purpose real applications using heterogeneous systems compose by regular processors and accelerators like GPUs (graphic processing units)
• hardware synthesis for specific applications that are usually addressed in software
• high performance scalable distributed multimedia systems to handle huge amounts of concurrent users
• scalable and cost-effective solutions based on wireless sensor networks

HECO is certified by UNIPAMPA and registered on Brazilian agency CNPq in the research groups directory, and is partially supported by an Academic Development Scholarship Program known as PBDA, provided by UNIPAMPA, and by projects supported by Brazilian funding agencies CNPq and FINEP, and also by local agency FAPERGS, where the HECO team cooperates with consolidated groups from different research institutes in the task of pushing state-of-the-art technologies in order to build efficient solutions for several kinds of systems.