Bio-inspired mechanisms for arrays of custom processors
- When?
- Tuesday 5 October 2010, 14:00 to 15:00
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Dr Gianluca Tempesti, University of York
Until recently, the ever-increasing demand of computing power has been met on one hand by increasing the operating frequency of processors and on the other by designing architectures capable of exploiting parallelism at the instruction level through hardware mechanisms such as super-scalar execution. However, both these approaches seem to be reaching (or possibly have already reached) their practical limits, mainly due to issues related to design complexity and cost-effectiveness.
The current trend in computer design seems to favour a shift to coarser-grain parallelization, typically at the thread level. High computational power is achieved not by a single very fast and very complex processor, but through the parallel operation of several on-chip processors, each executing a single thread. This kind of approach is implemented commercially through multi-core processors and in research through the Network On Chip (NoC) or the Chip Multi-Processors (CMP) paradigms.
This architectural shift introduces problems common to all massively parallel systems, ranging from the design of applications that can exploit large numbers of processing nodes to technological challenges related to the implementation of such nodes on substrates that are increasingly error-prone.
Biological organisms are obvious examples of highly complex massively parallel systems that operate within a substrate where faults are common. Drawing an analogy between processing nodes and biological cells, it then becomes interesting to attempt to integrate within electronic systems the kind of dynamic behaviours exhibited by biological organisms in processes such as growth and evolution.
