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.