PRiME: Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems
Embedded computing systems are powerful tools for tackling global economic and societal challenges. Many of these are low-power mobile devices. Continuing advances in microprocessor and embedded system design are key to delivering this.
Project leader
Prof B Al-Hashimi (University of Southampton)
Dates
May 2013 to May 2018
Project staff
Prof M Butler, Dr G Merrett, Prof A Romanovsky, Prof PYK Cheung, Dr GA Constantinides, Prof A Yakovlev, Prof SB Furber, Dr JD Garside
Sponsors
Partners
Altera Europe, ARM Ltd, ESP Central Ltd, Freescale Semiconductor UK Ltd, Imagination Technologies Ltd, Microsoft Research, National Microelectronics Institute, Technology Strategy Board
Description
The microprocessor is one of the most significant scientific inventions of the 20th century. Over 10 billion processors were sold in 2011. Forecasts predict over 40 billion processors will be sold by 2020. The global market is worth over 20 billion euro with annual growth rates of 14%.
Microprocessors and computing systems have a tremendous positive impact on everyday life. From the internet to consumer electronics, transportation, healthcare and manufacturing, they are now intrinsic to our lives.
But computing systems face a once-in-a-generation technical challenge. The relentless increase in processor speed to improve performance of the past 50 years has come to an end. As a result, computing systems are moving away from performance-centric serial computation. They are switching to energy-efficient parallel computation. Using many slower parallel processor cores has higher energy efficiency than a single high-speed one. This switch has attracted worldwide attention. The terms "multi-core" and "many-core" describe the vision of computing systems with many processor cores. This is one of the most dynamic areas of computer science and electronics. It could have a huge commercial and academic impact. We already see processors with many-cores in high performance and cloud computing. Examples are the Cisco 188-core Metro, Intel 80-core Terascale, and IBM 64-core Cyclops chips. Mobile and embedded devices with dual- and quad-cores, such as the ARM Cortex-A7, are starting to emerge.
But these are only embryonic examples. We are yet to see the future of high performance mobile and embedded systems with many-core processors. The ability of these systems to respond to the real world will transform how we work, do business, shop, travel, and care for ourselves. They will transform our daily lives and shape the emergence of a new digital society for the 21st century. New high-performance embedded systems will complement, enhance and supersede existing systems in a wide range of applications. These include telecommunications, consumer electronics, transport and medical systems. Energy efficiency and reliability are central to such systems.
Many-core technology can improve performance at the processor level. But we know little of the implications on the energy efficiency and reliability of future embedded systems with 100s or 1000s of cores. To enable the sustainability of many-core scaling, we must prevent the uncontrolled increase in energy consumption and unreliability. We can do this through a step-change in holistic design methods and cross-layer system optimisation. PRiME will deliver this science
We will establish the new science and engineering needed to design future high-performance, energy-efficient and reliable embedded systems with many-core processors. We bring together four groups with world-leading expertise in the complementary areas of low-power, highly-parallel, reconfigurable and dependable computing and verified software design. Four internationally renowned experts will also contribute to PRiME as Visiting Researchers: J. Henkel, Karlsruhe Uni., embedded systems, V. Betz, Uni. Toronto, FPGA/CAD, M. Kaaniche, LASS-CNRS, dependability, and T. Roscoe, ETH-Zurich, operating systems.