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EPSRC Enpower Project

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. Led by Jose Nunez-Yanez and Simon McIntosh-Smith from the University of Bristol, ENPOWER proposes a new design paradigm for energy proportional computing where voltage and logic scaling are applied in tandem in a variation-aware, closed-loop configuration that is exposed to application software. The proposed design paradigm develops configurable heterogeneous processors that self-regulate their operating point and define the hardware units that are most optimal for application execution. Dimitris Nikolopoulos, Director of Research in the HPDC Cluster and Roger Woods of the EEECS Digital Communications Cluster team up to explore how the OpenCL programming language can leverage energy models to achieve, adaptive, energy-aware execution of software kernels on reconfigurable heterogeneous processors. The teams from Bristol and Queen's will partner with Quioptiq and Xilinx in ENPOWER, which was ranked first by the EPSRC responsive mode panel of June 2013.