Event-based parallel computing - partially ordered event-triggered systems (POETS)

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 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.