Timothy Jones Awarded Prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC Research Fellowship

Timothy Jones has been awarded five years of funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering and EPSRC to investigate energy efficiency in the next generation of microprocessors.

The Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC Research Fellowships are awarded to outstanding researchers from all branches of engineering who are about to finish their PhD or have up to three years post-doctoral research experience. This is the first time such a fellowship has been awarded to a researcher at The University of Edinburgh.

The goal of Timothy's work is to use the compiler to help make energy saving decisions in multi-core processors. He will tackle this problem at design, at compilation and during program execution. The overall aim is to create a dialogue between the software and hardware, using knowledge gained at both levels to influence energy saving decisions.

Timothy's PhD research considered the use of the compiler for energy saving within current microprocessors. He has published widely in top international hardware conferences attended by both academics and industry from around the world. His previous work has produced significant benefits, including:

• Schemes to turn off parts of a processor once they are no longer needed, thus saving energy. In particular, these approaches also turn these components back on again in time for them to be reused, meaning the processor can still operate at full speed;

• A technique that places code in memory so that it can be accessed using only half the power of a conventional approach. This scheme was developed for an ARM processor which is ubiquitous in handheld devices such as mobile phones, where it could be used to help extend the system's battery life;

• The use of machine-learning to help choose the most energy-efficient processor design from over 18 billion options. This helps manufacturers to quickly evalute many different processor configurations, cutting design costs and time-to-market.

Timothy is a post-doctoral research fellow within the Compiler and Architecture Design (CArD) Group in the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture.