Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), established in 1845, is the 9th oldest University in the UK and a member of the Russell Group, which covers the top 24 research-driven universities in the UK. Queen’s is ranked in the Top 1% of Universities in the World (QS World Rankings). According to the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) Exercise, Queen’s is ranked 8th in the UK in terms of research intensity and 17th in the UK in terms of research power. The School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EEECS) is ranked 5th in the UK in terms of research excellence in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and among the top 100 in the world (QS World Rankings 2012). 100% of the School’s research impact and 84% of the School’s research output was judged as world leading or internationally excellent in REF 2014. The activities of this project will be hosted in the High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC) Research Cluster in the School of EEECS, a 30-strong, UK-leading research group in experimental computing systems research, which leads a £30m research grant portfolio and underpins the new Queen’s Global Research Institute on Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) and a newly established Centre for Data Science and Scalable Computing within ECIT.

Contribution to OPRECOMP

The QUB team will lead WP6 on software environment and tools and will have significant contribution in the system integration and demonstration as part of WP8. QUB will make proportional contributions to management and technical workpackages, as needed to develop the hardware-software interface of the OPRECOMP platforms.

Team

Roger Woods

Prof Roger Woods is Research Theme leader for the Systems and Sensors cluster in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in Queen’s University of Belfast. His current research activity includes hardware accelerators for Big Data analytics and signal processing, and in particular, the use of field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. He is a founder and currently acts as Chief Scientist of Analytics Engines Ltd. a 20-person company which provides data analytics solutions. He has a leadership role in the eFutures network (https://efutures.ac.uk/) which consolidates the academic community engaged in all aspects of electronics research in technology/design. He has been co-investigator for the NanoStreams project (FP7-610509, €3.3m) that explored disruptive software and hardware technologies for improving the energy-efficiency of many-core computing systems at scale. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Senior Member of the IEEE, and Senior Member of the ACM. He holds BSc (’85) and PhD (’90) degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Queen’s University of Belfast.

For the OPRECOMP project, Roger is working on the multi-precision aspects of the hardware implementation and the software compiler aspects.

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Dr. Hans Vandierendonck

Dr. Hans Vandierendonck is Lecturer at Queen’s University of Belfast. His research interests are in the design of parallel computing systems with a focus on languages and runtime systems for parallel programming and on memory systems. He obtained the MSc in Computer Science at Ghent University, Belgium in 1999 and the PhD degree at Ghent University in 2004. He was Fellow with the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) from October 2004 until March 2012. He received the Jozef Plateau Prize from the Alumni Association of Engineers at Ghent University for his MSc Thesis (2000), and the IBM Belgium Prize for Informatics twice, once for his MSc Thesis (2000) and once for his PhD thesis (2004). He was visiting researcher at Universidat Polytecnica de Catalunya with Prof. Mateo Valero in 2001, at INRIA Rennes with Prof. André Seznec in 2005 as well as at the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) with Prof. Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos in 2010–2011. Dr. Vandierendonck has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship. He is Senior Member of the IEEE and Senior Member of the ACM.

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Dr. Georgios Karakonstantis

Dr. Georgios Karakonstantis is a lecturer in the School of EEECS, Queen’s University Belfast, U.K. and as a member of the HPDC cluster is driving the efforts on approximate, scalable computing and storage architectures. Prior to joining Queen’s, Georgios was a senior research scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, U.S.A. In the summer of 2008, he was with the Advanced Technology Group, Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA, and in 2003 he worked in the VLSI lab of Intracom, Athens, Greece. He has authored over 50 papers in referred journals and conferences, a patent and a book chapter. In 2012 he was awarded a 4-year Marie-Curie Career Integration Grant by the European Commission and in 2010, his work on a quality adaptive and energy efficient camera was awarded at the International Altera Innovate Design Contest. Georgios co-led 5 European, Swiss and industrial funded projects on the design of energy efficient and error resilient computing systems, while currently he leads as coordinator the EU UniServer project that received 5M € for exceeding the energy and performance scaling boundaries in next-generation micro-servers. Georgios served as chair of the 1st and 2nd workshop on Approximate Computing, co-located with the HiPEAC conference 2015, 2016.

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Dr. Charles J Gillan

Dr. Charles J Gillan is a Principal Engineer at the Institute for Electronics Communication and Information Technology (ECIT). He obtained his PhD at the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1988 having carried out research in theoretical and computational physics in which He developed the R-matrix method to study resonant processes in the scattering of low energy electrons by small molecules. He continued this work until 1991 becoming an expert in the vector processing hardware commonly used in HPC at that time Cray X-MP, Y-MP, Cray 2 and IBM 3090. In 1992 and 1993 he worked on IBM Mulliken® package in the Theoretical Chemistry group at the IBM Research Division in San Jose, California.

Subsequently he moved to New York, working a project leader on a low latency subsystem for sovereign debt instrument trading within the Global Report product of ADP Inc.

On returning to the UK, Dr Gillan worked for Nortel Networks (UK) Ltd until 2004 in the embedded software group. In this post he managed a global software team, adhering to an ISO9000 quality assurance framework, and delivered software within technical contracts valued at up to US $60M. He took up a post at ECIT in 2004. He has published forty two papers to date.

He co-ordinates the FP7 Handhold project funded under the Security Theme to develop a portable and reconfigurable system for detection of CBRNE materials for civil law enforcement. He is project manager and researcher on the FP7 NanoStreams project, a member of the H2020 AllScale and H2020 UniServer projects.

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Umar Minhas

Umar Minhas completed his bachelors and masters degree from Institute of Space Technology, Pakistan and Imperial College London, United Kingdom, respectively. He has been working as Research Assistant with Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom since 2015 where he has been involved with various European research projects.

In OPRECOMP project, he is involved with optimization of system resources via intelligent scheduling and resource allocation techniques based on transprecision computing. He is also involved with the integration of system software stack with an aim to abstract transprecision techniques in programming environments.

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Ioannis Tsiokanos

Ioannis Tsiokanos received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2016. Currently pursues his Ph.D. on design of energy efficient and variation tolerant pipelined micro-architectures at the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, UK. His current research interests include low-power designs, fault tolerance circuits and hardware/software co-design with an emphasis on robustness.

In OPRECOMP project, he is involved with exploration of dynamic, data-dependent path activation to analyze the impact of transprecision computing on timing failures. He is also focusing on revealing dynamic timing slacks  and exploiting them through approximation based mechanisms aiming at improving the energy/power efficiency.

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Prof. Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos

Prof. Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos is Professor and Head in the School of EEECS, Queen’s University of Belfast, where he is also a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow and Research Director in High Performance and Distributed Computing. His current research activity explores co-designed hardware and software for high performance computing and new computing paradigms at the limits of power and reliability. Professor Nikolopoulos is known for research contributions to system software for many-core distributed and embedded systems. The accolades of Dimitrios include the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, NSF CAREER Award, US DoE Early Career Principal Investigator Award, IBM Faculty Award, Marie Curie, HiPEAC Fellowship and seven best paper awards from top-tier conference such as SC and PPoPP. His research has been supported with over €48 million of highly competitive, external research funding. Professor Nikolopoulos is the Coordinator of NanoStreams (FP7-610509, €3.3m), ALEA (EP/L000055/1, £700k) and SERT (EP/M01147X/1, £1m), three major collaborative efforts in the EU and the UK that explore disruptive software and hardware technologies for improving the energy-efficiency of many-core computing systems at scale. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, Senior Member of the IEEE, and Senior Member of the ACM. He holds MSc (’97) and PhD (’00) degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras.

Dimitrios worked in the OPRECOMP project as a member of the Governing Board.