High Performance & Distributed Computing

Latest news

Keynote talk at International Conference on Energy-Aware High Performance Computing

Dimitris Nikolopoulos gave the keynote talk at the Fourth International Conference in Energy-Aware High Performance Computing, in Dresden, Germany. The talk titled "Programming the Energy-Efficiency of High Performance Computing Systems" explored how scale-free parallel programming can control energy as a programmable resource, reduce hardware waste, and bring tangible benefits to the sustainability of HPC systems.

FUSION project to accelerate engineering simulations.

NUMA Engineering Services has experience in stress, fluid, heat transfer and numerical code development projects. QUB and NUMA have won a FUSION award to incorporate the latest computer architecture hardware acceleration methods (e.g. the graphics card) into current and upcoming software development projects, across several fields of engineering and research. Ivor Spence and Peter Kilpatrick from the HPDC cluster will assist in building a fast engineering simulation software package which can be used to make the design phase of products more efficient.

CCGrid'14

Dimitris Nikolopoulos, DR in the HPDC Cluster and Kirk Cameron, Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, will serve as Program Co-Chairs of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing. CCGrid is a highly competitive conference and a major international forum for presenting and sharing recent research results and technological developments in the field of high performance distributed computing.

EPSRC ENPOWER project seeks energy-proportional heterogeneous computing

A looming energy crisis endangers the electronics industry with collapsing battery lives and unsustainable internal power densities. ENPOWER, a new EPSRC project in the HPDC Research Cluster at Queen’s, investigates novel techniques for voltage, frequency and logic scaling that enable the design of sustainable and energy-proportional computing systems... Read more...

EPSRC ALEA project accords energy first-class status for many-core software developers

Parallel programmers are becoming increasingly aware of performance and correctness during the software development cycle. Unfortunately, they ignore the most precious resource that computing systems use today: energy. The EPSRC ALEA (Abstraction-Level Energy Accounting and Optimisation for Many-core Programming Languages) project accords energy first-class status in parallel programming languages... Read more...

Reducing the energy consumption of memory hierarchies

An ICS13 paper co-authored by Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos of the HPDC Cluster and collaborators at FORTH-ICS explores a new hardware/software interface for reducing the energy consumption of the memory hierarchy. The authors use code annotations that are common in task dataflow programming models to identify task lifetimes and explicitly manage last-level cache memories... Read more...

SCORPIO FET Open project explores new computing paradigm based on uncertainty to break the power wall

Multicore scaling is power limited in such a degree that by 2020, when Exascale systems are due to arrive, more than 50% of the transistors of a processor will have to be powered off in every cycle. At the same time, transistor variability threatens the correct operation of future computing systems. The SCORPIO FP7 FET-Open project envisions a new computing paradigm... Read more...

Best paper award in COSMIC workshop, held in conjuction with CGO 2013

The paper "Fast Dynamic Binary Rewriting to Support Thread Migration in Shared-ISA Asymmetric Multicores" authored by Giorgis Georgakoudis, Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Spyros Lalis won the best paper award at the International Workshop on Code Optimisation for Multi and Many Cores (COSMIC) held in conjunction with CGO 2013 in Shenzhen, China... Read more...

Hans Vandierendonck awarded EU Marie Curie Fellowship NovoSoft on software management techniques for new energy-efficient memory technologies

Main memory is consuming an increasing fraction of total system energy. In servers, memory may consume 40% of the budget, a figure that is still rising. New non-volatile memory (NVRAM) technologies, such as phase-change RAM and resistive RAM, have different energy properties, consuming less static energy but spending more energy per memory access than the current state-of-the-art dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory technology. The NovoSoft project aims to drastically reduce memory system energy consumption... Read more...