The PRiME Project Value Proposition

Power-efficient, Reliable, many-core Embedded systems

www.prime-project.org

PRiME is a £5.6m EPSRC-funded programme involving researchers from four UK universities in collaboration with five companies and seven international visiting experts. The vision is to enable the sustainability of many-core scaling by addressing the challenges of power consumption and the reliability of future high-performance embedded systems utilising many-core processors.

Novel features of PRiME

• Adaptive mechanisms for many-core embedded systems which manage and optimise trade-offs between performance, energy and resilience to hardware failures
• Correct system behaviour maintained in the event of hardware faults in order to achieve the required quality of service for a given application
• Seamless and cooperative interaction across system layers to achieve desired system trade-offs, thus providing a step change in energy efficiency and reliability
• Dynamic reconfiguration of processing cores and interconnect to match functionality with application needs
• Novel modelling techniques for CPU power consumption, allowing real-time, adaptive power control
• Research outputs evaluated through novel homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms and demonstrators, executing both recognised benchmarks and envisaged future applications

Technology roadmap

2007: Pervasive Systems Centre formed at the University of Southampton
2008: ARM-ECS Research Centre formed at the University of Southampton
2008: EPSRC platform grant on system-on-chip (GR/S95770/01)
2009: EPSRC project on energy harvesting electronics (EP/G067740/1)
2011: EPSRC platform grant on electronic design (EP/E035965/1)
2013: PRiME project receives £5.6m of EPSRC funding (EP/K034448/1) with industrial partners ARM, Imagination Technologies, Altera, Microsoft Research and Freescale

Collaboration opportunity

We are currently three years into the five year project. We are interested to hear from companies that are interested in PRiME research, either as potential users of the technologies developed or with something to contribute. In particular, we are looking to build relationships with companies that can provide input on current and likely future applications of many-core systems. We want to identify these in order to direct research and to develop industrially relevant technology demonstrators.

If you would like to know more, please contact Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi bmah@ecs.soton.ac.uk or info@prime-project.org