Resarch Associate - Manchester, United Kingdom - The University of Manchester

The University of Manchester

Verified Company

Manchester, United Kingdom

2 weeks ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

BACKGROUND

This position is funded through a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Computer Systems and is co-financed by Arm.

The forecast for IoT/Edge growth expects a world with a trillion connected devices by 2030, all gathering data and triggering distributed processing pipelines that aim to minimize data movement (the most energy consuming part).

Ultimately, IoT/Edge computing systems will need to analyse and filter more data, leading to increased demands on their computational capacity whilst maintaining their power envelopes.

Moving forward, thermal constraints are forcing computer architectures (System-on-Chips) to include hardware accelerators (such as GPUs that are hardware accelerators for graphics).

The UK has an almost unique opportunity to play a leading role in the development of low-power System-on-Chips (SoCs) for IoT/Edge systems.

However, designing these SoCs with hardware accelerators is still highly human labour intensive and lacks appropriate integrated methodologies and tools.

Overall Purpose of the Job
As with most modern product design, the design of new SoCs relies heavily on simulations.

The speed, accuracy and flexibility of the simulator have a significant impact on the size of the design space that can be explored and, therefore, on the quality of the final system.

In future computational systems silicon photonics may also play a role to improve the connectivity within a SoC or in data centres.

This project will investigate a novel simulation approach, based on a combination of software and hardware acceleration using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).

A key component of the effectiveness of the simulation platform is using the FPGA hardware acceleration system efficiently. We refer to the simulation platform as SimAcc.

This job will involve both software and hardware (FPGA) development to improve SimAcc's support for System-on-Chip memory hierarchy and memory controllers.

In addition, a thorough analysis and verification of SimAcc results vs existing software simulators will need to be carried out.

The ultimate aim of the project is to improve the existing SimAcc infrastructure and provide SoC designers with an effective alternative to simulators based solely on software running on general purpose CPUs.

Our University is positive about flexible working - you can find out more here

Blended working arrangements may be considered

Enquiries about the vacancy, shortlisting and interviews:

Name:
Professor Mikel Lujan

General enquiries:

Technical support:

**Please see the link below for the Further Particulars document which contains the person specification criteria.