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UK funding (£4,981,301): Event-based parallel computing - partially ordered event-triggered systems (POETS) Ukri12 May 2016 UK Research and Innovation, United Kingdom
Overview
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Event-based parallel computing - partially ordered event-triggered systems (POETS)
| Abstract | POETS (Partially Ordered Event Triggered Systems) is a significantly different way of approaching large, compute intensive problems. The evolution of traditional computer technology has taken us from simple machines with a handful of bytes of memory and (by the standards of today) glacial clock speeds, to multi-gigabyte architectures running five or six orders of magnitude faster, but with the same fundamental process at the heart: a central core doing one thing at a time. Over the past few years, architectures have appeared containing multiple cores, but exploiting these efficiently in the general case remains a 'holy grail' of computer science. POETS takes an alternative approach, made possible only today by the proliferation of cheap, small cores and massive reconfigurable platforms. A previous EPSRC project, BIMPA, enabled us to assemble a million core machine, creating a kind of 'meta-computer'. Rather than program explicitly the behaviour of each core and each communication between them, as is done in conventional supercomputers, here the programmer defines a set of relatively small, simple behaviours for the set of cores, and leaves them to get on with it - with the right behavioural definitions , the system 'self-organises' to produce the desired results. BIMPA was designed primarily for neuroscience applications, but a subsidiary research objective allowed us to study the use of the architecture for alternative (physics-based) problems, and we have demonstrated that this kind of approach can lead to dramatic speed increases over conventional solution techniques. POETS is not a general-purpose computing technique, but it is elegantly suited to a variety of traditionally compute intensive engineering and research problems, where it can produce results orders of magnitude faster than conventional machines at a fraction of the cost. The purpose of this research project is to explore this application arena: what kind of architectures are best (fastest)? How might they be automatically configured to self-organise? How might we build bridges between this new technology and a nascent user base? Industry has invested heavily - quite sensibly - in computing technology over the years, and if POETS is to become the disruptive technology we believe it to be capable of, we need to address a serious 'hearts and minds' issue for commercial uptake to ensue. |
| Category | Research Grant |
| Reference | EP/N031768/1 |
| Status | Closed |
| Funded period start | 12/05/2016 |
| Funded period end | 11/11/2022 |
| Funded value | £4,981,301.00 |
| Source | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FN031768%2F1 |
Participating Organisations
| University of Southampton | |
| e-Therapeutics | |
| Newcastle University | |
| Imperial College London | |
| Microsoft Research | |
| Chinese University of Hong Kong | |
| UK ATOMIC ENERGY AUTHORITY | |
| e-Therapeutics Plc | |
| NMI (National Microelectronics Inst) | |
| Imagination Technologies Ltd UK | |
| Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd (NAG) UK |
The filing refers to a past date, and does not necessarily reflect the current state. The current state is available on the following page: University of Southampton, Southampton.
