Event-based parallel computing - partially ordered event-triggered systems (POETS)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Southampton
Department Name: Sch of Electronics and Computer Sci
Abstract
POETS (Partially Ordered Event Triggered Systems) is a significantly different way of approaching large, compute intensive problems. The evolution of traditional computer technology has taken us from simple machines with a handful of bytes of memory and (by the standards of today) glacial clock speeds, to multi-gigabyte architectures running five or six orders of magnitude faster, but with the same fundamental process at the heart: a central core doing one thing at a time. Over the past few years, architectures have appeared containing multiple cores, but exploiting these efficiently in the general case remains a 'holy grail' of computer science.
POETS takes an alternative approach, made possible only today by the proliferation of cheap, small cores and massive reconfigurable platforms. A previous EPSRC project, BIMPA, enabled us to assemble a million core machine, creating a kind of 'meta-computer'. Rather than program explicitly the behaviour of each core and each communication between them, as is done in conventional supercomputers, here the programmer defines a set of relatively small, simple behaviours for the set of cores, and leaves them to get on with it - with the right behavioural definitions , the system 'self-organises' to produce the desired results.
BIMPA was designed primarily for neuroscience applications, but a subsidiary research objective allowed us to study the use of the architecture for alternative (physics-based) problems, and we have demonstrated that this kind of approach can lead to dramatic speed increases over conventional solution techniques.
POETS is not a general-purpose computing technique, but it is elegantly suited to a variety of traditionally compute intensive engineering and research problems, where it can produce results orders of magnitude faster than conventional machines at a fraction of the cost.
The purpose of this research project is to explore this application arena: what kind of architectures are best (fastest)? How might they be automatically configured to self-organise? How might we build bridges between this new technology and a nascent user base? Industry has invested heavily - quite sensibly - in computing technology over the years, and if POETS is to become the disruptive technology we believe it to be capable of, we need to address a serious 'hearts and minds' issue for commercial uptake to ensue.
POETS takes an alternative approach, made possible only today by the proliferation of cheap, small cores and massive reconfigurable platforms. A previous EPSRC project, BIMPA, enabled us to assemble a million core machine, creating a kind of 'meta-computer'. Rather than program explicitly the behaviour of each core and each communication between them, as is done in conventional supercomputers, here the programmer defines a set of relatively small, simple behaviours for the set of cores, and leaves them to get on with it - with the right behavioural definitions , the system 'self-organises' to produce the desired results.
BIMPA was designed primarily for neuroscience applications, but a subsidiary research objective allowed us to study the use of the architecture for alternative (physics-based) problems, and we have demonstrated that this kind of approach can lead to dramatic speed increases over conventional solution techniques.
POETS is not a general-purpose computing technique, but it is elegantly suited to a variety of traditionally compute intensive engineering and research problems, where it can produce results orders of magnitude faster than conventional machines at a fraction of the cost.
The purpose of this research project is to explore this application arena: what kind of architectures are best (fastest)? How might they be automatically configured to self-organise? How might we build bridges between this new technology and a nascent user base? Industry has invested heavily - quite sensibly - in computing technology over the years, and if POETS is to become the disruptive technology we believe it to be capable of, we need to address a serious 'hearts and minds' issue for commercial uptake to ensue.
Planned Impact
POETS is a new type of computing technique, the realisation of which will enable certain classes of (traditionally extremely compute intensive) problems to be solved, we think, orders of magnitude faster than on conventional machines. It will, in effect, enable the supercomputer-on-a-desktop, and this is important: if a compute run can be reduced in cost to the point that it is effectively free, managers can provide the resource with as little (financial) impact as a desktop PC, and engineers - of all levels - can 'play' with ideas, exploring alternative concepts and solutions freed from the constraint of worrying about the cost of their explorations. Supercompute resource will no longer be the preserve of multi-million pound enterprises; application-specific POETS engines can be ubiquitous in SMEs as well as large organisations.
As well as the obvious potential direct benefits to UK plc of providing this capability, the effects of POETS will be felt indirectly on society and industry in many ways:
Reduced time-to-market for manufacturing
Superior design quality of components and systems
Real-time non-invasive imaging of dynamic systems
Biological: medicine
Industrial: chemistry, oil, foodstuffs
Health: image-guided surgery, drug design
Weather modelling (both conventional and stratospheric)
Military: situational awareness
POETS will not revolutionise any of these directly. What it will do is make currently expensive calculations (and the corresponding infrastructure) disappear from budget sheets.
These impacts are long-range and must be grounded in the context of what we can realistically achieve with a program grant. Ideally, we would like to take the research to a level approaching the MoD Technology Readiness Level 5: "Technology basic validation in a relevant environment", by which we mean demonstrating the value of the concept to relevant industrial concerns in terms with which they are familiar. This will provide traction with investors and open the door to the next stage of exploitation and commercialisation.
As well as the obvious potential direct benefits to UK plc of providing this capability, the effects of POETS will be felt indirectly on society and industry in many ways:
Reduced time-to-market for manufacturing
Superior design quality of components and systems
Real-time non-invasive imaging of dynamic systems
Biological: medicine
Industrial: chemistry, oil, foodstuffs
Health: image-guided surgery, drug design
Weather modelling (both conventional and stratospheric)
Military: situational awareness
POETS will not revolutionise any of these directly. What it will do is make currently expensive calculations (and the corresponding infrastructure) disappear from budget sheets.
These impacts are long-range and must be grounded in the context of what we can realistically achieve with a program grant. Ideally, we would like to take the research to a level approaching the MoD Technology Readiness Level 5: "Technology basic validation in a relevant environment", by which we mean demonstrating the value of the concept to relevant industrial concerns in terms with which they are familiar. This will provide traction with investors and open the door to the next stage of exploitation and commercialisation.
Publications
Al-Hayanni M
(2020)
Amdahl's law in the context of heterogeneous many-core systems - a survey
in IET Computers & Digital Techniques
Al-Hayanni Mohammed A. Noaman
(2019)
Investigation into scalable energy and performance models for many-core systems
Ali K
(2017)
Applied Reconfigurable Computing
Andrew Brown
(2017)
Parallel Computing is Everywhere
Andrew Brown
(2017)
Distributed event-based computing
Brown A
(2020)
Parallel Computing: Technology Trends
Brown A
(2023)
POETS: An Event-driven Approach to Dissipative Particle Dynamics Implementing a Massively Compute-intensive Problem on a Novel Hard/Software Architecture.
in ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing
Brown A
(2018)
SpiNNaker: Event-Based Simulation-Quantitative Behavior
in IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems
Brown A
(2022)
Non-deterministic event brokered computing
Brown, Andrew
(2019)
POETS: Distributed event-based computing - scaling behaviour
Description | POETS is a novel technique for the solution of certain high-value compute-intensive problems. These are not, in general, problems of which the general public will be aware, but they are societally relevant. Technological advances allow us to realise - cheaply - vast numbers of processors (>millions). Programming these in a manner that allows exploitation of the hardware fully is a system design bottleneck. One way of addressing this is by event-driven programming, where millions of small cores communicate asynchronously with each other, and the desired "solution" becomes an emergent property of the ensemble. This is an extremely powerful computational technique, and can produce - for certain classes of problem - virtually constant scaling. An example is useful here: Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) is a computational technique supporting the physical simulation of billions of chemical particles, producing macroscopic chemistry in a computer: currently an extremely expensive capability, accessible only to those with access to (and experience of) traditional high performance computers. COVID illuminated some limitations of these techniques. The structure of the virus was elucidated by complex biochemical sleuthing, assisted by computational modelling, at massive cost. The modelling illuminated parts of the big picture, but the utility of simulation comes in answering the questions that the user didn't think to ask. One outcome of the POETS research programme is to pave the way for the construction of an event-based DPD system that will make it possible to watch an entire virus pass through a cell wall (in simulation), in a 'sensible' amount of wallclock compute time: hours, not months. This takes simulation capability to space- and time-scales currently unobtainable, even with nation-scale budgets. This technology will put simulation capability in the hands of every competent lab researcher in every bio lab, and sufficiently cheaply that 'compute resource' disappears as a budget sheet line item. This is vitally important: the cost and accessibility will allow human analysts to *play*, which allows human creativity to shine. The next global pandemic may not be as amenable to analysis as COVID. Society needs vastly more powerful analysis tools, although the only widely visible effect would be the speed at which solutions are discovered. In essesnce, the goal of the overall project was to vastly (many orders of magnitude) increase the speed at which certain problems (not all) can be addressed by machines. Few have heard of the areas where this technology is effective, but almost eveyone would be affected by the outputs. |
Exploitation Route | To answer the question in the previous box (the Researchfish robot will not allow this entry): To choose one, the most illuminating publication is "POETS: An event-driven approach to Dissipative Particle Dynamics". ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, accepted for publication in 2023. -------------------------------------------------------------- Taking the outcomes forward: The technology is still at TRE1/2, possibly 3 at a push. Two routes forward are attractive to us: (1) the computational chemistry application domain is obviously relevant, and there are a host of issues we would like to address. The UKRI programme grant allowed us to build prototype machines, construct a computational infrastructure and identify (and solve) a host of problems. We have in place now sufficient hardware to produce the next generation of technology in this area - perhaps to realise the goal outlined above. (2) Next generation computer modelling and artificial intelligence. To drive this we have an over-arching research goal that is both nationally important and challenging: real-time modelling of UK financial risk. It is easy to identify underlying risks *after* they cause a financial crisis. With hindsight, the 2008 financial crash was caused by too many banks buying too many risky mortgages. Whilst the crisis was unfolding it was all new information: no-one realised how many banks owned the risky mortgages. Then it was assumed that mortgage defaults were unlikely. Finally it was assumed that losses in a few banks would not affect the national economy. The problem was a lack of visibility and understanding of the national picture: each bank appeared to have a manageable risk level, but most banks in the UK were exposed to the same underlying risk factor, so once mortgages started defaulting most banks started losing money and a perfect financial storm developed. What we needed then, and still do now, is national-level risk modelling that can consider risk across banks as it occurs. The technology developed in POETS is ideally suited to this kind of high-volume, distributed compute system. |
Sectors | Aerospace Defence and Marine Chemicals Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Electronics Energy Environment Financial Services and Management Consultancy Manufacturing including Industrial Biotechology Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology |
Description | The project has been successful on almost every level: career progression of staff (at all levels), discipline hopping to an extraordinary degree (both within Electronics and Computer Science and between higher levels of the technical hierarchy - chemistry, materials science, finance.....). It has been directly responsible (at the University of Southampton) for the creation of both a new research group (Computer Architecture) and a new undergraduate degree course (Computer Engineering, the one holding stewardship of the other) that will span the interests of both the Electronic Engineering and Computer Science components of the Department. Above all, it has given rise to a large volume of original and useful research, and has engendered three significant paths forward (the ENNUI, ARIA and SONNETS projects) with the potential for many more from section 5. Programme grants are special, and extremely productive: the length of time, depth of funding and overall flexibility allowed us to engage four universities and undertake research that would be infeasible if we needed to bid for funding in smaller increments over shorter periods of time. Any of the individual major components of POETS - hardware foundation, software infrastructure, application domain exploration would, in principle, have been feasible under the aegis of Responsive mode funding, but none of the three would have had any real point without a guarantee that the others would be in place alongside it. The only level on which we could arguably be faulted is on the outreach and communication component, but two years of COVID-induced disruption on that front would not have been a productive battle to fight. The entire research trajectory, plus technical and non-technical outputs, is described in detail in the Final Report to the POETS Advisory Board. Copies of this may be found in the University of Southampton Research Output Repository (Southampton ePrints), and have been lodged with EPSRC. |
First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
Sector | Chemicals,Education,Electronics,Energy,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy |
Impact Types | Societal |
Description | Title: SONNETS: Scalability Oriented Novel Network of Event Triggered Systems |
Amount | £6,467,613 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/X036006/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 01/2024 |
End | 12/2028 |
Title | Additional file 2 of GeDi: applying suffix arrays to increase the repertoire of detectable SNVs in tumour genomes |
Description | Additional file 2 raw_data.zip is available online and contains raw data for generating the figures and tables presented in the main text and SupplementaryData.pdf. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://springernature.figshare.com/articles/Additional_file_2_of_GeDi_applying_suffix_arrays_to_inc... |
Title | Additional file 2 of GeDi: applying suffix arrays to increase the repertoire of detectable SNVs in tumour genomes |
Description | Additional file 2 raw_data.zip is available online and contains raw data for generating the figures and tables presented in the main text and SupplementaryData.pdf. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://springernature.figshare.com/articles/Additional_file_2_of_GeDi_applying_suffix_arrays_to_inc... |
Title | Research data supporting "General hardware multicasting for fine-grained message-passing architectures" |
Description | This is the data package accompanying the paper "General hardware multicasting for fine-grained message-passing architectures", to appear at PDP 2021. It contains version 0.8.3 of Tinsel/POLite, described in the paper, along with the benchmark applications and graphs used to obtain the results. Please note that the latest versions are available at https://github.com/POETSII/tinsel. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2021 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/321768 |
Title | Research data supporting "Termination detection for fine-grained message-passing architectures" |
Description | This is the data package accompanying the paper "Termination detection for fine-grained message-passing architectures", to appear at ASAP 2020. It contains version 0.6.3 of Tinsel/POLite, described in the paper, along with the benchmark applications and graphs used to obtain the results. Please note that the latest versions are available at https://github.com/POETSII/tinsel. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/307487 |
Description | Collaboration with E-Therapeutics |
Organisation | e-Therapeutics |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Development of algorithms, hardware and software for accelerating problem solving for network analysis. |
Collaborator Contribution | Providing important practical problem definitions in the domain of network analysis, evaluation of the experimental data and results. |
Impact | Earlier there was a successful impact generated from this collaboration with colleagues in Computing Science: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/research/impact/casestudies/drug-discovery/#discovermore This work continues now under the POETS project. Language and Hardware Acceleration Backend for Graph Processing, Andrey Mokhov, Alessandro de Gennaro, Ghaith Tarawneh, Jonny Wray, Georgy Lukyanov, Sergey Mileiko, Joe Scott, Alex Yakovlev, Andrew Brown, published in Springer, 2019 https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/language-and-hardware-acceleration-backend-for-graph-processing/16353914 |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | Collaboration with Microsoft Research |
Organisation | Microsoft Research |
Country | Global |
Sector | Private |
PI Contribution | Dr Andrey Mokhov, member of the Newcastle team has been working closely with Microsoft Research on developing modelling foundation based on graph algebra for build systems. Andrey Mokhov holds a research fellowship from Royal Society in which MSR is a key partner. |
Collaborator Contribution | Dr Simon Peyton-Jones, one of the leading Research Scientists at MSR, Cambridge, collaborated with Dr Andrey Mokhov. They published a number of papers. Andrey Mokhov holds a research fellowship from Royal Society in which MSR is a key partner. |
Impact | Joint publications |
Start Year | 2015 |
Description | POETS partners |
Organisation | Imperial College London |
Department | Department of Computing |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Research partners on POETS project |
Collaborator Contribution | Research partners on POETS project |
Impact | It is too early in the project for any outputs. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | POETS partners |
Organisation | Newcastle University |
Department | Institute of Neuroscience |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Research partners on POETS project |
Collaborator Contribution | Research partners on POETS project |
Impact | It is too early in the project for any outputs. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Description | POETS partners |
Organisation | University of Southampton |
Department | School of Electronics and Computer Science Southampton |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Research partners on POETS project |
Collaborator Contribution | Research partners on POETS project |
Impact | It is too early in the project for any outputs. |
Start Year | 2016 |
Title | POETS Application Generator (pml) |
Description | pml is a tool that composes POETS applications from manifest, code and graph files. It provides a developer-friendly input format, abstract programming models and programmable code generation functions to developers wishing to write software for POETS. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2018 |
Impact | Not known |
URL | https://www.poets-project.org/tools/ |
Title | POETS Simulation Stack (pstack) |
Description | pstack is a distributed POETS simulation stack based on Redis. It exposes the compute power of a hetrogeneous array of POETS back-end engines to multiple users in a POSIX-like environment. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Impact | Not known |
URL | https://www.poets-project.org/tools/ |
Description | Bacterial Cell Biology - POETS shares its research worldwide (UK - University of Newcastle) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Meeting with Prof. Harwood was 1:1. CBCB seminar was around 60 people, RA's to Professors. The meeting with Prof. Harwood was a discussion on what research areas might be relevant and who were good contacts within the university in these areas. He then invited me to the CBCB seminar. Here a brief outline of the POETS project was given to the research staff and people were invited to suggest applications from their own research areas that might be worth pursuing. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | Blog on Energetic Computing |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | This blog is intended to communicate my views on a number of topics around Energy-Modulated Computing, such as Energy-driven computing, Real Power Computing, Electromagnetism, Causality, Asynchronous Circuits and Systems etc. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012,2013,2014,2015,2016,2017,2018,2019,2020 |
URL | https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/alexyakovlev/ |
Description | Evaluating the potential for POETS to support near term Covid modelling |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | In response to UKRI call for rapid response Covid funding, the POETS investigators led work evaluating the potential for POETS to support near term Covid modelling. This talk was initially given to internal colleagues and potential collaborators. It was used as a basis for consdiering submitting a bid to EPSRC and an early draft was sent to EPSRC for comments. Ultimately there was a decision across the team not to submit a formal proposal. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | Human/Bacterial Cell Interaction / Aelius Biotech - POETS shares its research worldwide (UK - University of Newcastle) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Colin Harwood recommended speaking to this dept. during our meeting. The team have a startup focusing on modelling bacterial action in human digestion. A brief outline of the POETS project was given and discussion was made on how this might be used in their own research area. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | International Symposium Workshop on Many-Core Computing |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | International Symposium Workshop on Many-Core Computing featured presentations from speakers from the UK, and overseas; presenting a rich selection of Computer Architecture and Software topics, ranging from modelling the human brain, over new ways of synthesizing hardware (logic in FPGAs) from Software-level descriptions, and new efficient neural network processors, to transformations of algorithms to be more energy efficient and higher performance. The talks were presented from a mixture of EPSRC project members and external researchers from both academia and industry. The symposium brought the scientific community together allowing the invited guests and project members to have open discussions and debates. POETS PI Prof Andrew Brown gave a talk entitled "Event-Driven Computing" about the work of the POETS researcher teams, which was very well received. Prof Brown also took part in a panel debate "Design for Trillions of Smart Objects: What are Key Research Drivers?" chaired by POETS Co-I Prof Alex Yakovlev of University of Newcastle. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://www.prime-project.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/206/2018/02/Talk-14-Andrew-Brown-POETS-Partial... |
Description | Manycore Summer School 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | POETS PI Prof Andrew Brown delivered talks at the MaRIONet Summer School (EPSRC funded) on Event-Based Computing, covering the history and the future of approaching real-world engineering computing problems using simulation including the array of applications this approach has. Students engaged in discussion and interest in the subject was raised. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://manycore.org.uk/ss_slides/andrew_brown_slides.pdf |
Description | Newton Gateway to Mathematics - Novel Computational Paradigms |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | POETS Co-I and University of Cambridge lead investigator, Prof Simon Moore, gave a talk entitled "Communication Locality in Computation: Software, Many-core Processors and Brains" as part of a Newton Gateway to Mathematics 2 day event. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://gateway.newton.ac.uk/presentation/2018-10-30/24492 |
Description | POETS Internal Seminar Series - Analogue Circuit Simulation |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Professor Andrew Brown gave a talk to the POETS team on Analogue (continuous) circuit simulation. The talk included equation formulation and solution, March-in-time (starting a simulation and dynamic timestep control), Gyrators and mixed tableau formulation, Continuous thermal simulation and 4D relaxation. There were details for the maths underpinning the thermal anaysis that still need to be worked out and provided material for a 4D reactive thermal POETS analysis. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | POETS Internal Seminar Series - Potential Directions for Financial Fraud Detections using Event-based Computing |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Dr David Thomas gave a talk to the POETS team about Potential Directions for Financial Fraud Detections using Event-based Computing as potential future applications that could utilise and benefit from the POETS hardware. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019 |
Description | POETS Internal Seminar Series - Users & Programmers: Introduction to seismic exploration and velocity model building using FWI |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | As part of the POETS Internal Seminar Series, Dr R Gareth Williams gave a talk on seismic exploration and velocity model building, as potential future applications that could utilise and benefit from the POETS hardware. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | POETS Internal Seminar Series - Users & Programmers: Publishing papers, especially discipline spanning papers |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Professor Andrew Brown gave a talk to the POETS team about writing papers for submission, including planning the paper, targeting the paper, matching the story to the audience and the importance of including pictures and graphs in the paper. The team includes a number of early career researchers who found the talk very helpful and are using the instructions to better write papers they are currently working on, with the aim of increasing acceptances at high quality journals. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | POETS Makes an Impact at DATE 2019 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | POETS was well represented at the event and made the most of opportunities to share research progress with a wide audience. The demos used a remote link to the POETS prototype at University of Cambridge, showing 3 applications running on the POETS hardware. These were 1) Graph Traversal Algorithms, 2) the Heat Dissipation Simulation and 3) Particle Simulations. https://poets-project.org/download/DATE19-POETS-poster.pdf https://poets-project.org/download/DATE19-POETS-demos-abstract.pdf |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://past.date-conference.com/proceedings-archive/2019/html/ubooth.html |
Description | POETS Makes an Impact at FCCM 2019 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | POETS was well represented at the event and made the most of opportunities to share research progress with a wide audience. The demos used a remote link to the POETS prototype at University of Cambridge, showing applications running on the POETS hardware and provided a live visualisation of the heat map of the hardware to show whicvh tyhreads, cores and FPGAs were sending messages. https://poets-project.org/download/FCCM19-POETS-poster.pdf https://poets-project.org/download/FCCM19-POETS-demo-abstract.pdf |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | http://www.fccm.org/past/2019/home/demo-night/ |
Description | POETS Talk at EPSRC-Funded Network eFutures |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Dr Mark Vousden gave a talk called "Partially-Ordered Event Triggered Systems, and the Challenges of Event-Based Computing" at an eFutures event on 'Rethinking Computing Architectures for Big Data and AI'. eFutures is EPSRC (link is external) funded network whose key aim is to help consolidate the academic community engaged in all aspects of electronics research in technology and design in a bid to tackle current issues and address the major challenges of the future. This paticular event was especially aimed at early career researchers, who were interested in learning about computer architectures, including a discussion on the POETS engine. https://poets-project.org/download/poets_challenges.pdf |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://efutures.ac.uk/rethinking-computing-architectures-big-data-and-ai-event |
Description | POETS shares its research worldwide, Belgium |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Andrey Mokhov, the lead POETS investigator at Newcastle, gave a talk on the distributed drug discovery application the POETS team is developing in collaboration with our industrial partner e-Therapeutics. The talk introduced the architecture and discussed ways to accelerate average shortest path computations on large protein interactomes, as well as using distributed genetic algorithms to find promising drug candidates. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | POETS shares its research worldwide, Sweden |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Andrey Mokhov, the lead POETS investigator at Newcastle, gave a talk on the distributed drug discovery application the POETS team is developing in collaboration with our industrial partner e-Therapeutics. The talk introduced the architecture and discussed ways to accelerate average shortest path computations on large protein interactomes, as well as using distributed genetic algorithms to find promising drug candidates. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://www.it.uu.se/research/computer_systems/seminars/180920 |
Description | POETS shares its research worldwide, Switzerland |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) is an organization devoted to the promotion of fundamental research on advanced computational methods and to their application to important problems in frontier areas of science and technology. They host a regular programme of international flagship events and attract attendees from across the world. The workshop was well attended and the talk given led to good questions and discussions on POETS research afterwards. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://www.cecam.org/workshop-4-1520.html?presentation_id=18551 |
Description | POETS shares its research worldwide, UK |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Dr Julian Shillcock, POETS visiting expert gave a talk "Bacteria, Entropy and the Need for Speed" demonstrating usage of simulations of dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) to study proteins in cells of chronic diseases such as Ahlzeimer's and ALS. DPD falls into the first class of industrial case classes POETS is addressing - homogenous problems. The SET research group hosted the talk, which sparked questions and discussion afterwards, and attendees included researchers from several UK universities. https://www.bio.ecs.soton.ac.uk//events/B216 |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | PhD Open Day |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Postgrad LIVE! SOUTHAMPTON is an on-campus Masters & PhD study fair at the University of Southampton, and takes place each year in February. The event hosts over 50 universities and institutions and includes a comprehensive talks programme about Masters & PhD study. Researchers from the POETS team attended and distributed brochures about the POETS project, funded by EPSRC, and provided details about a range of fully-funded PhD opportunities associated with the POETS project for students. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
Description | Researcher visit to e-Therapeutics |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Over the two days, 2 postdoctoral researchers met with various employees of e-Therapeutics, mainly computational biologists, and learnt about what their typical workflow looked like. These meetings focused on details such as where data was obtained from, the types of computations they wished to perform, and the latencies/throughput they expected/tolerated. These interviews helped us gather a clearer picture as to how POETS could improve their development cycle. Researchers also presented to e-Therapeutics employees the current status of POETS and the current developments underway that might directly relate to e-Therapeutics, which generated good discussions. Several analysis stages of the e-Therapeutics workflow were identified as potential areas where POETS could be beneficial, (mainly network analysis techniques Steiner Trees, counting triangles, network rewiring). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Statistical Genetics - POETS shares its research worldwide (UK - University of Newcastle) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | A brief outline of the POETS project was given. Previous applications that had been explored were described and the strengths and limitations of the current hardware were explained. Ian then gave several suggestions on applications that might be suitable for the project. He suggested imputation, which was subsequently investigated. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | The POETS Project: Partially Ordered Event Triggered Systems for future HPC applications |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Speaker: Coral Westoby gave a talk to the Women@CL group at University of Cambridge Title: The POETS Project: Partially Ordered Event Triggered Systems for future HPC applications. Abstract: The physical sciences have been intrigued by event driven computing systems since the first analog integrators. The POETS project (Cambridge lead S. Moore) provides a hardware platform to observe convincing weak scaling for simulations running under a Partially Ordered Event Triggered System, with the aim of motivating future HPC architectural developments. Current research activities include applications investigation in molecular mechanics, neural biology, and ML alongside the programming and architectural support required to use tens of thousands of threads where 4 instructions take longer than a message passing operation. Within the CL, a cluster of 72 Intel DE10 SX280 boards with 100Gb/s interconnect is currently under construction, providing a fabric an order of magnitude larger than currently available. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Visiting Lecture Series in Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
Results and Impact | Professor Andrew Brown delivered a series of four 90-minute lectures to postgraduate students at the University of Kaiserslautern as a visiting international speaker. Seminar I covered some history of computing before introducing the concept of parallel computing, focussing on event-based computation to solve real-world engineering computing problems. Seminar II described event-based simulation of neural circuits using the SpiNNaker machine, the SpiNNaker machine's architecture and how it produces biologically realistic behaviour. Seminar III described the POETS engine, another event-based machine that can be exploited for a much wider application portfolio than SpiNNaker, covering in some detail how the POETS engine uses event-based techniques to solve the real problem of space-filling neural synthesis. Seminar IV discussed a number of topics allied to event-based computation, including solving heat equations, investigating reliability and presenting an overview of some areas that can benefit from event-based computing such as computational chemistry, weather modelling, financial market modelling and genome searching. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
Description | Visiting Lecture Series in University of Klaiserslauten |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Professor Andrew Brown delivered a series of four 90-minute lectures to postgraduate students at the University of Kaiserslautern as a visiting international speaker. Seminar I covered some history of computing before introducing the concept of parallel computing, focussing on event-based computation to solve real-world engineering computing problems. Seminar II described event-based simulation of neural circuits using the SpiNNaker machine, the SpiNNaker machine's architecture and how it produces biologically realistic behaviour. Seminar III described the POETS engine, another event-based machine that can be exploited for a much wider application portfolio than SpiNNaker, covering in some detail the current state of the POETS project - current architecture, supporting software infrastructure and tool chains. Further explanation is given on a range of applications such as the heat equation solution, neural synthesis, earthquake modeling, skyrmions, neural simulation and financial and societal fraud detection showing how, as problem sizes grow, the speed advantage of the POETS technique become more and more significant. Seminar IV examines more deeply a particular application domain - computational (bio) chemistry, focussing on an algorithmic technique known as Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD). Looking at problems causing significant societal problems lacking effective biochemical interventions - such as Alzheimer's - the talk described how event-based processing can be used to massively accelerate simulations that can make significant contributions to the elucidation of these problems. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | Visiting Lecture Series in University of Klaiserslauten |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Professor Andrew Brown delivered a series of four 90-minute lectures to postgraduate students at the University of Kaiserslautern as a visiting international speaker. Seminar I covered some history of computing before introducing the concept of parallel computing, focussing on event-based computation to solve real-world engineering computing problems. Seminar II described event-based simulation of neural circuits using the SpiNNaker machine, the SpiNNaker machine's architecture and how it produces biologically realistic behaviour. Seminar III described the POETS engine, another event-based machine that can be exploited for a much wider application portfolio than SpiNNaker, covering in some detail how the POETS engine uses event-based techniques to solve the real problem of space-filling neural synthesis. Seminar IV discussed a number of topics allied to event-based computation, including solving heat equations, investigating reliability and presenting an overview of some areas that can benefit from event-based computing such as computational chemistry, weather modelling, financial market modelling and genome searching. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019 |