Smart Parallelisation and Architecture Support (Industry-sponsored 4-year MSc(R) + PhD studentship in the CDT in Pervasive Parallelism)

One fully funded industry-sponsored studentship is available at The University of Edinburgh, as part of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism, starting September 2016. Sponsorship will be provided by ARM, the world’s leading semiconductor IP company.

From data centres to smartphones, today’s computers are based on parallel multi-cores. They offer the potential for scaled performance while avoiding excessive power density. Efficient use of such systems, however, relies on both sufficient program parallelism and accurate exploitation of that parallelism by the hardware. Given that much software consists largely of sequential code and computer hardware is constantly changing, efficient parallelisation is a real challenge.

This project is concerned with parallelism discovery using static and dynamic analysis followed by portable smart mapping of parallelism to hardware. There are multiple areas for research which include:

– Parallel/vector trade-off in large systems Here we are concerned with discovering parallelism and exploring what type of hardware best exploits it. For example is using multiple-core or vector/SIMD best in terms of performance and energy? Integrating this into partial parallel MPI programs, providing support for speculation and dynamic allocation of parallelism are other areas of interest

– Exploring hardware design to exploit available parallelism Using dynamic analysis it can be shown that programs have considerably parallelism that cannot be exploited efficiently. Here, we are concerned with investigating how future hardware should be designed. By changing costs or redesigning micro-architecture, this work will investigate to what extent hardware can efficiently support the exploitation of more aggressive program parallelisation.

This project is sponsored by ARM, where there is an opportunity to work across research groups. The exact details of the project are flexible depending on the candidate’s interests and background.

Eligibility
You should have a good first degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics or Mathematics.

Further information
For further information, please visit:
http://pervasiveparallelism.inf.ed.ac.uk/industry-studentships/

ARM: http://www.arm.com/

How to apply
Apply by submitting a research proposal and completing an online application form: http://pervasiveparallelism.inf.ed.ac.uk/apply/

Please state the name of this project and sponsor in your application.