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Case 4 - Reconfigurable Computing for High Performance Applications

Summary of the impact

In the last 20 years, reconfigurable technology has transformed High-Performance Computing and Embedded Systems Design. Research of the Custom Computing and Reconfigurable Systems teams at Imperial made pivotal contributions to this transformation, targeting particularly Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. Since 2008, the impact of this research has been to

I1) underpin design flow for partial run-time reconfigurable designs for Xilinx FPGA devices;

I2) contribute to the start-up company Maxeler, pioneering reconfigurable computing systems and cloud services for high-performance computing in the financial and other sectors;

I3) enable near real-time risk analysis for JP Morgan's global portfolio to analyse and manage risk much faster than previously possible;

I4) achieve about 250 times speedup for Chevron's seismic modelling for oil and gas exploration, compared to the alternative use of CPU-based machines;

I5) accelerate a financial market integrity platform for BlueBee and HL Steam in hardware.

Submitting Institution

Imperial College London

Unit of Assessment

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software
Technology: Computer Hardware

Worldwide Industrial Adoption of Asynchronous System Design

Summary of the impact

Newcastle University's fundamental research into the automated synthesis of asynchronous systems and metastability analysis has resulted in new technologies that have been adopted worldwide by the microprocessor industry and educational sectors. In particular, Newcastle's asynchronous design methods and tools based on Petri nets have been used by the industry leading vendor Intel Corporation for their switch silicon technology, on which most transactions on the NYSE and NASDAQ (with combined daily volume of trade exceeding £80 billion) now rely. Oracle Corporation used the results of Newcastle's metastability analysis research for building their SPARC series of servers, marketed as having "world's fastest microprocessor".

Submitting Institution

Newcastle University

Unit of Assessment

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Mathematical Sciences: Applied Mathematics
Information and Computing Sciences: Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software

Energy supply industry design capability and chip manufacturers’ market performance are significantly enhanced by integrated computer hardware and software

Summary of the impact

Effective industrial design and simulation require efficient and versatile computing systems. As a result of research performed by our team experienced in High Performance Computing (HPC), novel software structures and aligned hardware architectures have led to significant benefits to the energy supply industry and to microprocessor manufacturers.

As a result of our research with supercomputing, simulation times for electric field patterns in power components have reduced more than 30-fold, with accurate complex 3-D outputs for an increased range of configurations, thereby enabling our partner company to achieve results not possible with commercial software and to reduce product development costs by $0.5M - $5M p.a.

Our research has been incorporated by Intel into their numerical libraries and now made available to the general public supported by their latest processor architectures. Intel now has a 82% share of processors, according to the November 2013 Top500 list.

Submitting Institution

University of Bedfordshire

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software

Milepost GCC and compiler research at Edinburgh

Summary of the impact

Compiler research at Edinburgh over the last decade has had significant industrial and commercial impact. Early work on pointer conversion is now available in Intel's commercial compilers. Later ground-breaking work on machine-learning based compilation led to the release of MilePost GCC, an enhanced version of the world's widest-used open source compiler supported by IBM. More recent work on parallelism discovery and machine-learning mapping has led to a new ARM Centre of Excellence at Edinburgh.

Submitting Institution

University of Edinburgh

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software
Technology: Computer Hardware

Dezineforce - pioneering cloud computing

Summary of the impact

Cloud computing is now used ubiquitously in consumer and commerce domains yielding unprecedented access to computing and data handling at affordable prices.

Work in this field was pioneered at the University of Southampton (UoS) from 1998 onwards and commercialised from 2008 through Dezineforce to enable companies to exploit cloud computing in engineering:

  • The technology was applied in industries including aerospace and defence, energy, civil engineering and automotive.
  • For small companies, we successfully demonstrated access to computing power and enhanced design tools delivered via the Cloud. e.g. Intelligent Flow Solutions used our tools to develop an innovative Wind Turbine Farm design with an increased lifetime return of over €55 million compared to alternative arrangements.
  • Large companies benefited from more efficient ways of collaborative working and advanced design search/optimisation technologies, which had not been possible before. For example Arup achieved a £1 million+ figure saving on a stadium design in the Middle East.
  • The IP was sold to Microsoft in 2011 with staff moving to roles in Microsoft's Azure Cloud/senior teams.

Throughout this period the team has also engaged in outreach to inspire and educate the next generation of scientists and engineers about High Performance and Cloud computing including a YouTube video with 485,000 hits and over 300 articles in media.

Submitting Institution

University of Southampton

Unit of Assessment

General Engineering

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Computer Software, Distributed Computing

Component-based Highly Productive Methodology for Software Development in Grid and Cloud Computing

Summary of the impact

The invention of a novel component-based model and approach for rapid distributed software development are the core research results for this case study. Using our methodology we have built a fully functional platform — the Grid Integrated Development Environment (GIDE) — which has been used for the development of user applications by several industrial partners. The main economic impact of our work is the new component-based development process resulting in much higher productivity and shorter development cycle. In addition, the four new international standards approved by ETSI provide impact on the wider professional community in the areas of grid and cloud computing.

Submitting Institution

University of Westminster

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software, Information Systems

Worldwide adoption of asynchronous circuits and improved business process modelling

Summary of the impact

Newcastle University's fundamental research into the theory of concurrency and the automated construction and analysis of asynchronous systems has resulted in novel technologies that have been adopted and applied worldwide by industry. This case study describes impact over the last five years on the industrial development of asynchronous microprocessor chips, in particular, deployed by Intel for handling financial transactions on NYSE and NASDAQ (with combined daily volume of trade exceeding £80 billion), and the improvements in business process analysis through the world-leading open-source ProM tools (downloaded over 65,000 times since 2008, and used by a number of major organisations, e.g. ING Bank and Deloitte).

Submitting Institution

Newcastle University

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Mathematical Sciences: Applied Mathematics
Information and Computing Sciences: Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software

Vehicle Crash Test Analysis Systems

Summary of the impact

Based on research within the Digital Media Technology group, innovative multi-media technologies for capturing, structuring, and analysing real-time crash test data were developed, between 1996 and 2006, leading to transformational impacts on the professional practices of the global vehicle crash testing industry. Initially realised through an award-winning technology transfer programme with MIRA, the systems have been widely deployed by leading crash test organisations, supported faster vehicle design iterations and contributed to the design of safer vehicles. The underpinning research has directly contributed to the ISO standard (ISO/DTR 13499) and its current version. The impact is ongoing and long lasting since most systems in current use are largely based on the original technologies.

Submitting Institution

Birmingham City University

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Computer Software, Information Systems

Teletest Focus, Non-Destructive Testing Device

Summary of the impact

In Europe, there are over a million kilometres of oil pipelines, nearly a million kilometres of railway tracks, 600 offshore platforms and 300 suspension cable bridges. However, these assets are aging as they have been in use for many years and operate under harsh conditions. Brunel research team has advanced ultrasonic non-destructive testing (NDT) which has the ability to inspect buried pipes in their original place without removing the pipes or damaging their surrounding environment. In addition, the research was pursued to improve the NDT of rail tracks, storage tanks, flexible risers in offshore platforms and aircraft wires. The research has been commercially exploited and incorporated into Teletest Focus System Mark III by Plant Integrity Limited. The significant improvement has led Plant Integrity to terminate the sale of Teletest Mark III and introduce a new version, Teletest Focus System Mark IV, to the market in late 2010. Since then, Plant Integrity has doubled its turnover from sales of Teletest Focus System Mark IV from £1 million to £2 million in less than a year.

Submitting Institution

Brunel University

Unit of Assessment

General Engineering

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Engineering: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Technology: Communications Technologies

System-on-Chip (SoC) IP cores for Digital TV and Multi-Media Systems

Summary of the impact

Research (1993-2008) on novel silicon architectures and design methodologies for digital signal and video processing led to the creation of world leading semiconductor IP cores (chip designs) for implementing the main video and image compression standards including H.264, MPEG4, MPEG2, and JPEG2000. These have been licensed to semiconductor manufacturers worldwide including Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and Sharp. Since 2008, such encoders/decoders have been incorporated into all DTV/HDTV SoCs produced by Conexant, NXP, Trident Microsystems and Entropic. They have also been used as the hardware acceleration engines in Intel's C2110 Media Processor. At least 150 million chips worldwide having been manufactured incorporating this technology.

Submitting Institution

Queen's University Belfast

Unit of Assessment

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Computation Theory and Mathematics
Technology: Computer Hardware

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