The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has provided £5.6m of funding to the five-year PRiME project, which will undertake creative research into the design and implementation of energy-efficient and dependable embedded systems with many-core processors. A UK national collaboration, PRiME (Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems) brings together four world-leading research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Imperial College, Manchester and Newcastle.
Many-core processing – computer systems with hundreds of microprocessors – has applications in embedded, mobile, general-purpose and high-performance computing, and is widely recognised as the future of computing.
Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, from the University of Southampton and director of PRiME, said: ‘Electronics and software have a tremendous impact on life, from the internet to consumer electronics, healthcare and transportation. Embedded systems, many of which will be low-power mobile devices, will be one of the most powerful tools in tackling global societal challenges.
‘However, while many-core processing is viewed as a way to improve the performance of computing systems, the energy consumption and reliability of these systems with hundreds or thousands of cores has yet to be fully understood.
‘Our vision is to enable the sustainability of many-core systems by preventing the uncontrolled increase in energy consumption and unreliability through a step-change in design methods and cross–layer system optimisation,’ he added.
PRiME will also develop the next generation of researchers and leaders by exposing investigators, research fellows and PhD students to a highly stimulating environment, in which research is expected to be both world-leading in terms of academic quality and also have industrial relevance. Research results will be disseminated through high impact publications, workshops, and invited talks at major international conferences.
