The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance – book your seat via Eventbrite (external link).
This event is being live-streamed via the Imperial YouTube channel.
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George Constantinides, Professor of Digital Computation at Imperial College London
Is the microprocessor under threat? Perhaps: certainly power consumption limitations reduce the proportion of transistors able to do useful work, fuelling a radical rethink of computational system design.
Fortunately, custom hardware coupled with modern state-of-the art software design techniques may come to the rescue, potentially speeding up workloads by a factor of ten or more. A first step is hardware accelerators in a heterogeneous system-on-chip, or low-level hardware programmability exemplified by Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Once a niche area, FPGAs may be poised to enter the data centre in a big way after Intel announced the $16.7 billion purchase of manufacturer Altera. These new approaches share common challenges, especially as hopes for the easy migration of algorithms to heterogeneous computing systems in a performance portable way remains largely unfulfilled.
In his lecture George Constantinides will chart his career in this exciting field, from a summer undergraduate project, to his latest work automating the conversion of algorithms into hardware, and the people and problems he has encountered along the way.
About the speaker
Prof George A. Constantinides received the M.Eng. (1998) and Ph.D. (2001) degrees from Imperial College London. Since 2002, he has been with the faculty at the same institution, where he currently holds the Royal Academy of Engineering / Imagination Technologies Research Chair in Digital Computation and leads the Circuits and Systems research group.