PRiME: Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems, brings together four research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Imperial College, Manchester and Newcastle.
The five-year £5.6m EPSRC funded project will undertake research into the design and implementation of energy-efficient and dependable embedded systems with many-core processors.
Many-core processing (computer systems with hundreds of microprocessors) has applications in embedded, mobile, general-purpose and high-performance computing.
Prof Bashir Al-Hashimi from Southampton University and director of PRiME, said, ‘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.’
A key component of PRiME is the connection between research and the involvement of industry to identify and translate technology outcomes from this programme to commercial exploitation.
The UK electronics industry is worth £23bn a year and is the fifth largest in the world. Within embedded systems, the UK is the world-leader thanks to the presence of ARM and Imagination, both collaborators on this proposal, as well as software and embedded system companies such as Microsoft Research, Freescale and Altera. Southampton University believes this research is essential in enabling industrial collaborators to compete in the future many-core market.
More information about PRiME can be found here.
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