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High Performance and Distributed Computing research enjoys significant success.

The High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC) research cluster have delivered several success stories this year.

In June 2013 a team of EEECS investigators under the lead of Professor Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos, Director of Research in High Performance and Distributed Computing Research, started working in the international research project SCoRPiO (Significance-Based Computing for Reliability and Power Optimization), funded by the FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) unit of the European Commission. FET only supports research that can lead to a significant breakthrough in the wider area of ICT. It is among the most prestigious sources of funding in Europe.

SCoRPiO seeks to dramatically change the way that next generation integrated circuits are designed and fabricated by relaxing the requirement that hardware is always correct. It exploits the observation that there are many applications in which errors are acceptable and even unnoticeable by the users.  For example, video applications can tolerate small variations in pixel values, audio applications can tolerate slight distortions, and classification applications may not be correct 100% all the time provided that they produce an overall acceptable outcome.

 SCoRPiO will research methods for characterizing the significance of various parts of the program for the quality of the end result, and their tolerance to faults and imprecision. Based on this information, computations and data can then be steered to either low-power and less-reliable, or higher-power and fully-reliable functional and storage components of the underlying computer platform. In addition, it becomes possible to aggressively reduce the system’s power footprint by powering hardware modules even below nominal values.

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

The NovoSoft project aims to drastically reduce memory system energy consumption and investigates system software to manage hybrid memory systems containing both NVRAM and DRAM components to maximise the benefits of each technology. EU Marie Curie Fellowships are prestigious investigator awards for researchers moving to or around Europe with a success rate below 15%. Hans Vandierendonck was awarded the NovoSoft project upon joining the HPDC research cluster at Queen's University Belfast.

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. ALEA takes a radically new approach to energy characterisation and optimisation, by measuring the energy consumed by language-defined code and data abstractions, across the hardware components that each abstraction activates.

About the cluster

The HPDC Cluster conducts pioneering research on software for massively parallel computing systems. Research considers systems at all scales, from custom heterogeneous many-core designs for the embedded systems domain, to Exascale systems and Datacentres.

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