The Advanced Processor Technologies Research Group

The Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group researches advanced and novel approaches to processing and computation. The group is based in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester where research into computer technology began more than 50 years ago with the construction of the world's first stored-program computer. Today the emphasis of the research is on identifying novel ways to exploit the formidable complexity of the billion transistor microchips that semiconductor technology will make commonplace over the next decade.

The APT group welcomes approaches from potential postgraduate students who are interested in studying for an MPhil or PhD with the group and we are keen to identify companies and other academic groups who are interested in collaborating with us in our research programmes. Current and recent APT projects include:

New Initiatives Human Brain Project - HBP Developing the SpiNNaker platform and making it available to the neuroscience and robotics communities, as well as starting the development of the next-generation SpiNNaker machine. Biologically-Inspired Massively Parallel Computation - BIMPC Using SpiNNaker to develop fundamentally new ways of computing using many simple processors in a way that is flexible, fault tolerant and efficient. SpiNNaker A universal Spiking Neural Network architecture. PAMELA A Panoramic View of the Many-core Landscape with focus on energy efficient mobile computer vision . AXLE Advanced Analytics using Accelerators (GPUs and FPGAs) RETHINK Developing the Roadmap for European Technologies in Hardware and Networking for Big Data. ARMOR A Hardware Solution to Prevent Row Hammer Error in DRAMs Tornado Utilising hardware accelerators from Java.

Research History Transactional memory An Efficient Page and Object-based Transactional Memory System iTLS iTLS: Combining Machine Learning and Runtime Managed Environments TERAFLUX Exploiting Dataflow Parallelism in Teradevice Computing Jamaica Hardware and Software for chip multiprocessors. Amulet Asynchronous ARM compatible processors. SPA A Synthesised Amulet Core Networks-on-Chip Self-timed interconnect for billion transistor Systems-on-Chip. Asynchronous DSP Asynchronous digital and special purpose signal processing.

Design Tools Balsa version 4.0 June 2010 - New release of the Balsa asynchronous design and synthesis tool. Note: This is the last release of Balsa. There will be no further development and future support will be limited. Teak version 0.1 May 2010 - First release AsipIDE May 2010 - Beta release of Galaxy GALS System Level Design Tools