The Circuits and Systems Group

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• Various
• Tuesday 30 October 2018, 09:30-11:30
• Level 9 Seminar Room, EEE Dept.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact George A Constantinides.

9:30 – 9:40am: George Constantinides, Introduction to CAS

9:40 – 9:55am: Shane Fleming: POETS : a new type of event-driven supercomputer

Large-scale parallel processing is changing the world, for example, in industry it is being used to aid drug discovery by analysing complex protein-protein interaction networks or performing large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. Generally, parallel systems come in two flavours: shared memory, where all parallel workers operate on the same data; and message passing, where parallel workers communicate via messages. Both of these approaches have challenges, in a shared memory system it is difficult to keep the worldview consistent across all parallel workers, while in a message passing system there are often high communication overheads and synchronisation issues. To amortise the communication overheads message passing systems often resort to passing large messages and performing large amounts of computation per parallel worker. POETS is a message passing system that aims to challenge this by doing the opposite —it has tens of thousands of small parallel worker threads that pass many small messages between them. It does this by using a custom hardware architecture, developed in-house, that has many networked devices where each device contains many simple cores connected together via a high-throughput network-on-chip. This allows for some novel research directions, for instance, smaller messages means that we can create efficient event-triggered applications where computation only happens when it is required. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the POETS stack and discuss, the programming model, the middle management layer, and the hardware architecture. I will also perform some live-demonstrations of some potentially promising applications we are currently investigating on the current working prototype system.

10:00 – 10:15am: Nick Moser: Integrated auto-calibration and in-pixel quantisation methodologies for CMOS ISFET arrays in Point-of-Care diagnostics

ISFE Ts have been popular over the past decade for their integration with standard CMOS technology. They are typically structured as arrays, which has allowed the emergence of the ion imaging field, where the chip acts like a chemical camera to image reactions happening at its surface. In this work, we focus on time encoding of the chemical signal to enable novel pixel architectures with higher Signal-to-Noise ratio and additional digital computation which is scalable to deeper submicron technologies. The sensing is paired with calibration methods to address sensor non-idealities such as offset and drift. The chip is the foundation to a cartridge-based Point-of-Care diagnostics platform for the diagnosis of infectious diseases in tropical countries. The device paired with a smartphone performs geo-tagging to allow fast mapping of epidemics.

10:45 – 11:30am: Eric Yeatman, Town Hall Meeting

This talk is part of the CAS Talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Andrea Picciau's list
• CAS Talks
• Circuits and Systems Group: Internal Seminars
• Level 9 Seminar Room, EEE Dept

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