Computer Laboratory

Computer Architecture Group

The Computer Architecture Group's specialty is all aspects of tomorrow's computing hardware including its supporting circuit and compiler technology.

Research Projects

We have a number of funded research projects which provide a focus to the work with various individual satellite projects - see information on people in the group for further details.

If you are interested in undertaking research in the group, please read the opportunities page carefully and remember you need to contact potential supervisors to discuss future projects since current projects are presented here.

Research Goals

Improvements in fabrication technology will ultimately provide the ability to construct computing devices from atomic scale components. These advances may be exploited to provide many orders of magnitude more processing power or equally impressive reductions in power consumption. The Computer Architecture Group's goal is to investigate how best to exploit these advances in order to realise a broad range of efficient, scalable and robust computing platforms. The design and implementation of computing hardware has been a major theme of the Computer Laboratory since its inception.

We believe that shifting technology characteristics and the move to highly parallel processor architectures makes this a particular exciting and challenging time for research in this area. While the ability to continue to improve the underlying fabrication technology seems certain, the ability to fully exploit such advances is quickly becoming a grand challenge for computer science. Meeting this challenge will require a step change in our approach to processor architecture together with significant advances in compiler, programming language, algorithm and operating-systems design.

The group's interests and expertise include multi-core processors and compilers, on-chip interconnection networks, novel approaches to system-timing, FPGA architectures, software programmable processing substrates and hardware security. We also have a keen interest in building chip and system prototypes in order to drive and demonstrate our research.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following organisations for supporting our research through funding or tool provision:

EPSRC, DARPA
Altera, Intel, Magma, Synplicity/Synopsis, Virtutech (Simics), Xilinx ARM