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21st Century Challenges in Computer Architecture

Nigel Topham
Professor of Computer Systems

5.15 pm, Thursday, 12 August 2004
Swann Lecture Theatre
Michael Swann Building (reference 25 on this map)
King's Buildings (in addition to above map, see directions on how to get to Edinburgh)
Reception in the foyer of the lecture theatre, after the talk

Abstract

In the past four decades there has been an exponential growth in the performance and capacity of computer systems. Although fuelled primarily by rapid advancements in semiconductor technology, computer architecture has been a major contributing factor during this exceptional period of growth. Through architectural innovation, and in particular the increasing use of parallelism, computer architects have managed to deploy increasing numbers of transistors to make systems run faster.

Immense progress has been made so far, but many questions still remain.Perhaps the most pertinent question is "how has it been possible to sustain exponential growth for 40 years?" Clearly it cannot continue indefinitely. Many researchers have speculated on when will it will stop. In this lecture I shall try to answer these questions and, using some recent examples of low-power embedded processors, I shall explore some critical issues on the horizon for computer architects.

The overall goal of the lecture is to identify some of the fundamental challenges for computer architecture in the 21st century, and to explain how the Computer Architecture Group will be addressing these in our future research.

Biography

Nigel Topham is Professor of Computer Systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research has been in the general areas of computer architecture, micro-architecture, and compiler optimisation techniques. His work has spanned several forms of instruction-level parallelism, including multi-threaded and Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures. He has also worked on compilation and optimisation techniques for VLIW. In a commercial context he has brought elements of this research to fruition. His current focus is on low-power microprocessors, and micro-architectural synthesis for low power systems. He was recently appointed Director of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture in the School of Informatics.

Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Nigel Topham was Chief Architect at ARC International, where he was responsible for the development of ultra low-power embedded microprocessors. Prior to that he was Co-founder and Chief Architect at Siroyan Ltd, a semiconductor intellectual property company specialising in high performance embedded processors. He has a BSc and a PhD in Computer Science from Manchester University, which he followed with post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh. He has previously held a Readership in Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a visiting position at the Advanced Computer Research Institute.