SuperLab: Future Chips

Yesterday I travelled up to the University of Bradford for the British Science Festival, one of Europe’s largest science festivals. Each year the Festival travels to a different UK location, with over 250 events, activities, exhibitions and trips taking place over a week to showcase the latest in science, technology and engineering. The theme for the 2011 Festival is “Exploring new worlds“. The British Science Festival is also the culmination of my British Science Association Media Fellowship, after working with BBC Wales (predominantly BBC Radio Wales) for the past six weeks. I will be reporting from the Festival’s press centre throughout the week.

However, I am also here for SuperLab, a joint initiative between the National Higher Education STEM Programme and the British Science Association. The National HE STEM Programme supports higher education institutions in the exploration of new approaches to recruiting students and delivering programmes of study within the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; I have previously worked with the Welsh HE STEM “spoke” based at Swansea University.

SuperLab consists of a poster-based campaign focusing on the wide range of in-store STEM applications in a modern supermarket, for example, the physics behind barcode scanners. It was originally planned to coincide with National Science and Engineering Week 2012 (every March, NSEW showcases how the sciences and engineering relate to our everyday lives and helps to inspire the next generation of scientists), but was reorganised to be part of this year’s Festival, as part of the Science in Action exhibition.

The topic for my research poster was the microprocessor, entitled “Future Chips“, somewhat subverting the original SuperLab theme. Nevertheless, I would assert that the invention of the microprocessor has had the greatest overall impact on our lives and development — I wanted to try and highlight to a wide audience how reliant we are on the all-pervasive microprocessor (especially its multitude of applications), as well as the ubiquitous nature of technology. In doing this, I wanted to get four main themes across:

• Swimming in a Sea of Silicon: highlighting our reliance on microprocessors;
• Limitations of Moore’s Law: how we are hitting the limits of existing architectural models and fabrication technologies;
• The Future is Multi-Core: the move away from a single high-speed processor to a multi-core methodology — a single computing component with numerous independent processors;
• The Challenge: Power Efficiency: in our increasingly connected digital world, improving the energy efficiency and power consumption of the billions of devices is paramount.

So, with thanks to the superb work from the professional designers (especially considering some of my inane scribblings), here it is:

For further reading…

If you are interested, here are the references to the research that is (briefly) mentioned in my SuperLab poster (or contact me):

• Tom Crick. Superoptimisation: Provably Optimal Code Generation using Answer Set Programming. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, August 2009.
• Tom Crick, Marina De Vos, Martin Brain and John Fitch. Generating Optimal Code using Answer Set Programming. In Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (LPNMR’09), volume 5753 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 554–559. Springer, 2009.
• Martin Brain, Tom Crick, Marina De Vos and John Fitch. TOAST: Applying Answer Set Programming to Superoptimisation. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2006), volume 4079 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 270–284. Springer, 2006.

I’m also involved in HiPEAC, the European Network of Excellence on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation, funded under the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The aim of HiPEAC is to steer and increase European research in the area of high performance and embedded computing systems and stimulate cooperation between academia and industry; for more information about HiPEAC, check out its research and activities.