EPSRC Established Career Fellowship for Mike O'Boyle

Research will explore "Heterogeneous Thinking": a fundamental re-think of how we design, program and use heterogeneous systems.

Congratulations to ICSA member Professor Mike O'Boyle, who has been awarded a five year EPSRC Established Career Fellowship. These fellowships recognize a track record of outstanding research and delivery of impact, and are awarded to candidates who have international standing and influence and the ability to lead and inspire.

The overall objectives of the fellowship are to investigate a novel compiler driven approach that can discover heterogeneous code structure, learn how to best map it to a range of specialised hardware devices and then use this ability to evaluate and explore new device designs.

In future, increasing specialisation means hardware will no longer be able to support a constant uniform instruction set architecture (ISA). Rather than compiler writers having to laboriously implement analysis and code generation for each new ISA, this project will investigate a novel approach to automatically constructing compiler translation and optimisation based on a description language.

This means, given a suitable description of a new heterogeneous device, we can automatically determine to what extent existing code fits and then, after potential (semi-) automatic transformations, best map it to a collection of devices.

Once we have the ability to match code to heterogeneous hardware, we can now invert the problem and ask: how would a new proposed heterogeneous design fit existing or future programs?