The University of Manchester is one of the top research-led universities and can lay claim to 25 Nobel Prize winners amongst its current and former staff and students, including 4 current Nobel laureates. The School of Computer Science plays important roles in the two EU FET flagship projects (Graphene and Human Brain Project) and collaborates with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) experiment headquartered in the university’s Jodrell Bank Observatory.
The School has a long and distinguished research record, including the development of the first stored program computer the late ‘40s, and the development of virtual memory among a range of innovations in the Atlas computer in the early ‘60s (the UK first supercomputer). The Advanced Processor Technologies group (APT) continues the excellent record in high performance low-power computer systems, and encompasses a range of research activities addressing the formidable complexity of both software and hardware for the many-core systems of the future. The APT group brings together more than 60 researchers (faculty, fellows, PhD students) and is one of the few centres of excellence able to design complex silicon as demonstrated by SpiNNaker; a one million ARM cores massively parallel architecture. APT has helped the EU competitive position with commercialization examples such as the ICL Goldrush Database server, Amulet processors (Low-power architectures) bought by ARM Ltd., Transitive Corporation (Virtualization and Binary Translation) bought by IBM and Silistix Ltd (Networks-on-Chip).
Role in the project
In ESiWACE2, UNIMAN contributes expertise in the development and optimisation of weather and climate applications on high-performance systems, contributing to tasks on Domain Specific Languages and technology watch in WP2 and on post-processing and analytics in WP5.
Colleagues involved
Dr. Graham Riley, Dr. Mike Ashworth