Speaker: Tim Summers

Speaker: Michel Steuwer, Adam Harries, Naums Mogers, Federico Pizzuti, Toomas Remmelg, Larisa Stoltzfus

The Lift project aims at generating high-performance code for parallel processors from a portable high-level program. Starting from a single high-level program an optimisation process based on rewrite rules transforms the portable program into highly-specialised low-level code delivering high-performance.

This talk will motivate the indispensability of performance portability given the increasing pace of the development of specialised hardware such as GPUs, FPGAs, or Google's TPU. After a brief introduction of the core aspects of Lift, the Lift team will give an overview of our ongoing research of using Lift for accelerating areas such as machine learning, physics simulations, graph algorithms, and linear algebra.

Speaker: Martin Sablotny

Today’s software products are complex entities with many functions. Those functions have to be tested thoroughly in order to prevent security issues. In the modern software development process fuzzing an important role in finding security related bugs.
Nonetheless developing generation based fuzzers for complex input formats is a time consuming work and requires a lot of knowledge about those formats. This work focuses on the use of  deep learning algorithms in order to create HTML tags, which are combined to test cases and executed inside a browser. First results have shown that it is possible to learn the format from a generation based fuzzer and outperform it in terms of code coverage.

Speaker: Prof Simon Moore

Memory safety bugs result in many vulnerabilities in our computer systems allowing exploits including recent security breaches: WannaCry, HeartBleed, CloudBleed and StackClash.  To fundamentally improve computer system resilience to these attacks, we propose a new processor (CHERI) together with compiler and operating system support that mitigate these bugs with few changes to applications.  CHERI provides fine grained memory protection using a new hardware supported type: the capability.  Capabilities provide hardware enforced provenance, integrity and bounds checking for code and data references.  We demonstrate how (code, data) capability pairs can be used for highly scalable and performant compartmentalisation.  Efficient compartmentalisation allows the principle of least privilege to be widely applied, mitigating both known and unknown attacks.  Though these changes to computer systems are radical, there is a clear adoption path and we are currently working with major commercial partners to transition the technology.

Speaker: Michel Steuwer

In this work, we advocate a composable approach to programming systems with Graphics Processing Units (GPU): programs are developed as compositions of generic, reusable patterns. Current GPU programming approaches either rely on low-level, monolithic code without patterns (CUDA and OpenCL), which achieves high performance at the cost of cumbersome and error-prone programming, or they improve the programmability by using pattern-based abstractions (e.g., Thrust) but pay a performance penalty due to inefficient implementations of pattern composition.

We develop an API for GPUs based programming on C++ with STL-style patterns and its compiler-based implementation. Our API gives the application developers the native C++ means (views and actions) to specify precisely which pattern compositions should be automatically fused during code generation into a single efficient GPU kernel, thereby ensuring a high target performance. We implement our approach by extending the range-v3 library which is currently being developed for the forthcoming C++ standards. The composable programming in our approach is done exclusively in the standard C++14, with STL algorithms used as patterns which we re-implemented in parallel for GPU. Our compiler implementation is based on the LLVM and Clang frameworks, and we use advanced multi-stage programming techniques for aggressive runtime optimizations.

We experimentally evaluate our approach using a set of benchmark applications and a real-world case study from the area of image processing. Our codes achieve performance competitive with CUDA monolithic implementations, and we outperform pattern-based codes written using Nvidia’s Thrust.

Speaker: Prof. Daniel J. Sorin

We have developed a hardware accelerator for motion planning, a critical operation in robotics. I will  present the microarchitecture of our accelerator and describe a prototype implementation on an FPGA. Experimental results show that, compared to the state of the art, the accelerator improves performance by three orders of magnitude and improves power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. These gains are achieved through careful hardware/software co-design. We have modified conventional motion planning algorithms to aggressively precompute collision data, and we have implemented a microarchitecture that leverages the parallelism present in the problem.

Speaker: Gorry Fairhurst

Abstract:

Active Queue Management (AQM) with Explicit Congestion Notification  (ECN) has been deployed in cloud data centres to minimise the latency  and improve the near real-time deadlines for workflows such as  Partition/Aggregate tasks. The talk explores how ECN can also reduce  latency of transactional applications using the Internet. This leads to  a simple sender-side change to TCP, “Alternative Backoff with ECN”, and  how this can offer a compelling reason to deploy and enable ECN across  the Internet. It finally outlines the path to standarisation and how  future research can enable new applications.

Bio: 

Gorry Fairhurst is a Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Aberdeen. His current research include performance evaluation and protocol design, Internet transport architecture, rural broadband access and satellite networking. He has 20 years experience working as an Internet Engineer, and is committed to open Internet standards and chairs the IETF’s Transport and Services Working Group (TSVWG).

Speaker: Michel Steuwer & Juan Fumero

Computer systems are increasingly featuring powerful parallel devices with the advent of many-core CPUs and GPUs. This offers the opportunity to solve computationally-intensive problems at a fraction of the time traditional CPUs need. However, exploiting heterogeneous hardware requires the use of low-level programming language approaches such as OpenCL, which is incredibly challenging, even for advanced programmers.

On the application side, interpreted dynamic languages are increasingly becoming popular in many domains due to their simplicity, expressiveness and flexibility. However, this creates a wide gap between the high-level abstractions offered to programmers and the low-level hardware-specific interface. Currently, programmers must rely on high performance libraries or they are forced to write parts of their application in a low-level language like OpenCL. Ideally, nonexpert programmers should be able to exploit heterogeneous hardware directly from their interpreted dynamic languages.

In this talk, we present a technique to transparently and automatically offload computations from interpreted dynamic languages to heterogeneous devices. Using just-in-time compilation, we automatically generate OpenCL code at runtime which is specialized to the actual observed data types using profiling information. We demonstrate our technique using R, which is a popular interpreted dynamic language predominately used in big data analytic. Our experimental results show the execution on a GPU yields speedups of over 150x compared to the sequential R implementation and the obtained performance is competitive with manually written GPU code. We also show that when taking into account start-up time, large speedups are achievable, even when the applications run for as little as a few seconds.

Speaker: Tim Storer

Socio-technical systems model the structure and interactions of
heterogeneous collections of actors, including human operators,
technical artefacts and organisations.  Such systems are characterised
by the interactions of actors at different scales of activity and behave
according to a complex interplay of factors, including formally defined
business processes, legal or regulatory standards, technological
evolution, organisational culture or norms and interpersonal
relationships and responsibilities.  The modelling and engineering of
such systems is still very much a a craft, requiring repeated trial,
error and subsequent revision.  Application of conventional systems
modelling methods is difficult, because socio-technical systems are not
readily disposed to functional decomposition, as the complex
interactions between components makes a separation of concerns
difficult.   As a consequence, existing techniques result in models that
either lack sufficient detail to capture the  effect of subtle
contingencies; are too narrow to make useful assessments about the
larger system; are unable to
 capture evolution in behaviours; or are so complex that analysis and
interpretation becomes intractable.

In this work, I will present a novel method for modelling
socio-technical systems that substantially reduces the difficulty of
simulating complex contingent behaviours.  In our approach, informal,
contingent behaviours are modelled as aspects that can be applied
obliviously to alter actor behaviour described in idealised workflows.
The aspects apply code fuzzers to the workflow descriptions, adjusting
the flow of execution of a workflow and representing the variability
that can occur in real life systems.  I will present a proof of concept
tool, Fuzzi Moss, and evaluate the approach using a case study of
software development workflows.

Speaker: Nick Brown

The Epiphany is a many-core, low power, low on-chip memory co-processor typical of a number of innovative micro-core architectures. The very low power nature of these architectures means that there is potential for their use in future HPC machines, and their low cost makes them ideal for HPC education & prototyping. However there is a high barrier to entry in programming due to the associated complexities and immaturity of supporting tools.

I will talk about ePython, a subset of Python for the Epiphany. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the hardware we have developed a new Python interpreter and this, combined with additional support for parallelism, has meant that novices can take advantage of Python to very quickly write parallel codes on the Epiphany and easily prototype their codes. In addition to running codes directly we have developed support for decorating kernels in existing Python codes and for these to be seamlessly offloaded, via ePython, to the Epiphany. I will discuss a prototype machine learning code for detecting lung cancer in 3D CT scans, where our decorators are used to offload the neural network onto the Epiphany in order to evaluate whether this technology is appropriate for these sorts of codes and what sort of performance once can expect.

Speaker: Walaa Alayed

The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) rely on the use of external Objective Functions for selecting the best path, where the majority of OFs are based on a single routing metric. In this talk I’ll be presenting an Analytic Hierarchy Process Objective Function (AHP-OF) inspired by multi-criteria decision making techniques.  The idea of AHP-OF is to combine several routing metrics by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to provide a better neighbour selection compared to existing OFs. The motivation of designing AHP-OF is to satisfy the different application requirements for Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN) such as reliable, real time and highly available applications.

Speaker: Prof. Des Higham

Many applications require us to summarize key properties of a large, complex network. I will focus on the task of quantifying the relative importance, or "centrality" of the network nodes. This task is routinely performed, for example, on networks arising in biology, security, social science and telecommunication. To derive suitable algorithms, the concept of a walk around the network has proved useful; through either the dynamics of random walks or the combinatorics of deterministic walks.

In this talk I will argue that some types of walk are less relevant than others. In particular, eliminating backtracking walks leads to new network centrality measures with attractive properties and, perhaps surprisingly, reduced computational cost. Defining, analysing and implementing these new methods combines ideas from graph theory, matrix polynomial theory and sparse matrix computations.

Speaker: Blesson Varghese

It is forecast that over 50 billion devices will be added to the Internet by 2020. Consequently, 50 trillion gigabytes of data will be generated. Currently, applications generating data on user devices, such as smartphones, tablets and wearables use the cloud as a centralised server. This will soon become an untenable computing model. The way forward is to decentralise computations away from the cloud towards the edge of the network closer to the user. In my talk, I will present challenges, my current research and vision to harness computing capabilities at the edge of the network. More information is available at www.blessonv.com.

Speaker: Niall Barr

Language Workbenches are tools used to support the creation and use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), frequently for the purpose of supporting Language Oriented Programming (LOP) or Generative Programming. LOP is an approach to application development where a language that is close to the problem domain is created, and the application is developed in this language. Generative programming is the related approach where a language at a high level of abstraction is used, and source code in a more general purpose language is generated from that code. In this talk I will describe the approach to web application development using generative programming that I have been using and evolving over several years, and my simple language workbench, WizardsWorkbench. As these web applications tend to follow a fairly similar pattern, DSLs are reused and evolved as required, my approach can be considered to be a form of Product Family Engineering that utilises generative programming. I will also describe the example driven approach which is used with WizardsWorkbench to develop both the parsers and the code generation output templates as well as the two DSLs used internally by WizardsWorkbench for parsers and templates.

Speaker: Paul Keir

In the last decade, high-performance computing has made increasing use of heterogeneous many-core parallelism. Typically the individual processor cores within such a system are radically simpler than their predecessors; and an increased portion of the challenge in executing relevant programs efficiently is reassigned. Tasks, previously the responsibility of hardware, are now delegated to software. Fast, on-chip memory, will primarily be exposed within a series of trivially distinct programming languages, through a handful of address spaces annotations, which associate discrete sections of memory with pointers; or similar low-level abstractions. Traditional CPUs would provide a hardware data cache for such functionality. Our work aims to improve the programmability of address spaces by exposing new functionality within the existing template metaprogramming system of C++

Speaker: Tyler Sorensen

GPUs are co-processors originally designed to accelerate graphics computations. However, their high bandwidth and low energy consumption have led to general purpose applications running on GPUs. To remain relevant in the fast-changing landscape of GPU frameworks, GPU programming models are often vague or underspecified. Because of this, several programming constructs have been developed which violate the official programming models, yet execute successfully on a specific GPU chip, enabling more diverse applications to be written for that specific device. During my PhD, we have examined one such construct: a global synchronisation barrier (or GSB). In this talk, we will address three key questions around this rogue programming construct: (1) Is it *possible* to write a portable GSB that successfully executes on a wide range of today's GPUs? (2) Can a GSB be *useful* for accelerating applications on GPUs? And (3) can a programming model that allows a GSB be *sustainable* for future GPU frameworks? Our hope is that this investigation will help the GSB find a permanent home in GPU programming models, enabling developers to exciting new applications in a safe and portable way.

Short Bio: Tyler’s research interests are in developing and understanding models for testing and safely developing GPU applications which contain irregular computations. In particular, he examines issues related to the GPU relaxed memory model and execution model. He received his MSc from University of Utah in 2014 and worked as an intern for the Nvidia compiler team during the summers of 2013 and 2014.

Speaker: Abeer Ali

Traditional network security systems consist of deploying high-performance and high-cost appliances (middleboxes) in fixed locations of the physical infrastructure to process traffic to prevent, detect or mitigate attacks.  This limits their provisioning abilities to a static specification, hindering extensible functionality and resulting in vendor lock-in.Virtualizing security function avoids these problems and increases the efficiency of the system. In this talk, we present the requirements and challenges of building a framework to deploy and manage virtualized security functions in a multitenant virtualized infrastructure like Cloud and how we can exploit latest advances in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and network services offered by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to implement it.

Speaker: Dr. Jan de Muijnck-Hughes

Communicating protocols are a cornerstone of modern system design. However, there is a disconnect between the different tooling used to design, implement and reason about these protocols and their implementations. Session Types are a typing discipline that help resolve this difference by allowing protocol specifications to be used during type-checking to ensure that implementations adhere to a given specification.

Idris is a general purpose programming language that supports full-dependent types, providing programmers with the ability to reason more precisely about programs. This talk introduces =Sessions=, our implementation of Session Types in Idris, and demonstrates =Sessions= ability to design and realise several common protocols.

=Sessions= improves upon existing Session Type implementations by introducing value dependencies between messages and fine-grained channel management during protocol design and implementation. We also use Idris' support for EDSL construction to allow for protocols to be designed and reasoned about in the same language as their implementation. Thereby allowing for an intrinsic bond to be introduced between a protocol's implementation and specification, and also with its verification.

Using =Sessions=, we can reduce the existing disconnect between the tooling used for protocol design, implementation, and verification.

Speaker: Dr Steven J Johnston

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have peaked in the hype curve and have demonstrated they are here to stay in one form or another. Many cities have attempted to retrofit 'smart' capabilities and there is no shortage of disconnected, often proprietary CPS addressing city infrastructure.

In the same way that online activity evolved from simplistic webpages to feature rich web 2.0, CPS also need to evolve. What will the Smart City 2.0 of tomorrow will look like, how will the architectures will evolve and most importantly how does this address the key challenges of cities; energy, environment and citizens. (Audience interaction welcomed)

Speaker: Levente Csikor

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a new way to operate, manage, and deploy communication networks and to overcome many of the long-standing problems of legacy networking. However, widespread SDN adoption has not occurred yet, due to the lack of a viable incremental deployment path and the relatively immature present state of SDN-capable devices on the market. While continuously evolving software switches may alleviate the operational issues of commercial hardware-based SDN offerings, lagging standards-compliance, performance regressions, and poor scaling, they fail to match the cost-efficiency and port density. In this paper, we propose HARMLESS, a new SDN switch design that seamlessly adds SDN capability to legacy network gear, by emulating the OpenFlow switch OS in a separate software switch component. This way, HARMLESS enables a quick and easy leap into SDN, combining the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density and cost-efficiency of hardware-based appliances into a fully dataplane-transparent and vendor-neutral solution. HARMLESS incurs an order of magnitude smaller initial expenditure for an SDN deployment than existing turnkey vendor SDN solutions while, at the same time, yields matching, or even better, data plane performance.

Speaker: Dr Marwan Fayed

Netflix, YouTube, iPlayer, are increasingly targets of the following complaint: "How come my child gets HD streams on her phone, while I'm stuck with terrible quality on my 50 inch TV?" Recent studies observe that competing adaptive video streams generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness behind bottleneck links. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users' perceived quality of experience as a consequence. Intuitively, application-generated issues should be resolved at the application layer. In this presentation I shall demonstrate that fairness, by any definition, can only be solved in the network. Moreover, that in an increasingly HTTP-S world, some form of client interaction is required. In support, a new network-layer 'QoE-fairness' metric will be be introduced that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reinforce the network-layer as the right place to attack the general problem.

Refs

[1] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570066341.pdf

[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2940144

Bio: Marwan Fayed received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. He joined the faculty at the University of Stirling, UK in 2009 as under the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) scheme. He recently held the appointment of 'Theme Leader' for networking research in Scotland. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS c.i.c., an ISP focussed on rural communities; recipient of an IEEE CCECE best paper award; and serves on committees at IEEE and ACM conferences.

Speaker: John O'Donnell

The computer program AlphaGo made history in 2016 by defeating Lee Sedol, one of the top professional go players, in a five game match.  A few weeks ago, an updated version of AlphaGo played 60 games against professionals and won them all.  The current generation of strong go programs use neural networks and Monte Carlo tree search.  These programs have a distinctive playing style and occasionally make astonishing moves, raising questions that are presently the focus of intensive research.  This talk will explore some of these issues, and illustrate them with incidents from the history of go as well as from the recent games by computers.

Speaker: Dr. Mark Post

Driven by ever more demanding applications, modern embedded computing and automation systems have reached unprecedented levels of complexity. Dr. Post’s research focuses on applying novel software and hardware architectures to simplify and distribute the structure of robots and other embedded systems, to make them robust and able to operate under uncertainty, and also allow to for more efficient and automated development processes. One way to achieve this is via the unification of programming and data, made possible by using probabilistic abstractions of exact data. In a new methodology for embedded programming developed through this research, exact variables are replaced with random variables and a computation process is defined based on evidence theory and probabilistic inference. This has many advantages including the implicit handling of uncertainty, a guarantee of deterministic program execution, and the ability to apply both statistical on-line learning and expert knowledge from relational semantic sources. Implementation on real-time systems is made reliable and practical by applying modular and lock-free inter-process communication, semantic introspection and stochastic characterization of processes to build robust embedded networks based on wide-computing concepts. This methodology in general has a vast array of potential real-world applications, and some aspects have been applied successfully to embedded programming of planetary rovers and agricultural robots.

Speaker: Robbie Simpson

Systems Engineering makes extensive use of modelling and analysis methodologies to design and analyse systems. However, it is rare for these methodologies to be effectively validated for correctness or utility. Additionally, the common use of case studies as an implicit validation mechanism is undermined by the lack of validation of these case studies themselves. This talk explores the problem of validation with specific reference to requirements engineering and safety analysis techniques, identifies the main shortcomings and attempts to propose some potential solutions.

Speaker: Robbie Simpson

Speaker: Dr Kostas Kyriakopoulos

The talk will go through the overview of research conducted in the "Signal Processing and Networks" group at Loughborough University, with a strong emphasis on the “Networks" side. We have developed algorithms for fusing cross layer measurements using the Dempster Shafer evidence framework to make decisions on whether packets/frames in the network are coming from a malicious source or from the legitimate Access Point. We are currently researching on how to infuse this system with contextual information besides the direct measurements from the network. The talk will also discuss other Networks relevant topics, including Ontologies for management of networks and some brief introduction to the group’s Signal Processing expertise in Signal Processing for defence areas.

Speaker: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Functional languages have traditionally had sophisticated ahead-of-time compilers such as GHC for Haskell, MLton for ML, and Gambit for Scheme. But other modern languages often use JIT compilers, such as Java, Smalltalk, Lua, or JavaScript. Can we apply JIT compilers, in particular the technology of so-called tracing JIT compilers, to functional languages? I will present a new implementation of Racket, called Pycket, which shows that this is both possible and effective. Pycket is very fast on a wide range of benchmarks, supports most of Racket, and even addresses the overhead of gradual typing-generated proxies.

Biography: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He has worked on dynamic languages, type systems, module systems, and metaprogramming, including creating the Typed Racket system and popularizing the phrase "scripts to programs." He is a member of the ECMA TC39 working group responsible for standardizing JavaScript, where he co-designed the module system for ES6, the next version of JavaScript. He received his PhD in 2010 from Northeastern University under Matthias Felleisen.

Speaker: Jeremy Singer

Jermey presents an analysis of beginner Haskell code.

Speaker: Dr Timothy M Jones

Many modern data processing and HPC workloads are heavily memory-latency bound. Current architectures and compilers perform poorly on these applications due to the highly irregular nature of the memory access patterns involved. This leads to CPU stalling for the majority of the time. However, on closer inspection, these applications contain abundant memory-level parallelism that is currently unexploited. Data accesses are, in many cases, well defined and predictable in advance, falling into a small set of simple patterns. To exploit them though, we require new methods for prefetching, in hardware and software.

In this talk I will describe some of the work my group has been doing in this area over the past couple of years. First, I'll show a compiler pass to automatically generate software prefetches for indirect memory accesses, a special class of irregular memory accesses often seen in high-performance workloads. Next, I'll describe a dedicated hardware prefetcher that optimises breadth-first traversals of large graphs. Finally, I'll present a generic programmable prefetcher that embeds an array of small microcontroller-sized cores next to the L1 cache in a high-performance processor. Using an event-based programming model, programmers are able to realise performance increases of over 4x by manual creation of prefetch code, or 3.5x for the same application using an automatic compiler pass.

Speaker: Prof Sven-Bodo Scholz

Traditionally, programs are specified in terms of data structures and successive modifications of these. This separation dictates at what time which piece of data is located in what space, be it main memory, disc or registers. When aiming at high-performance, parallel executions of programs, it turns out that the choice of this time / space separation can have a vast impact on the performance that can be achieved. Consequently, a lot of work has been spent on compiler technology for identifying dependencies between data and on techniques for rearranging codes for improved locality with respect to both, time and space. As it turns out, the programmer specified choice of data-structures often limits what can be achieved by such optimisation techniques. In this talk, we argue that a new way of formulating parallel programs that is based on a unified view on space and time not only matches much better typical scientific specifications, it also increases the re-usability of programs and, most importantly, it enables more radical space-time optimisations through compilers.

Speaker: Colin Perkins

Over the last few months, the Section has been engaged in a review of our undergraduate curriculum and teaching. This talk will outline the changes we’re proposing, and what we hope to achieve by doing so

Speaker: Mr Adrian Jackson

The hardware used in HPC systems is becoming much more diverse than we have been used to in recent times. Intel's latest Xeon Phi processor, the Knights Landing (KNL), is one example of such change, however bigger changes in memory technologies and hierarchies are on the way. In this talk I will outline our experiences with the KNL, how future memory technologies are likely to impact the hardware in HPC systems, and what these changes might mean for users.

Speaker: Dhahi Alshammari

Much cloud computing research is performed using simulators. There are many simulators available. One of the most common simulators is "CloudSim", which is widely used as a cloud research tool.  This talk will review briefly the CloudSim system and its various extensions. The extensions provide additional usability features and improved simulation fidelity. I will further present results of an empirical study to evaluate the precision of CloudSim by comparing it with actual test-bed results from the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud infrastructure

Speaker: Mr Andy Till

The BEAM virtual machine has flexible and powerful tooling for introspection, statistics and debugging without affecting the running application. Erlyberly is an ongoing project to lower the barrier for entry for using these capabilities, focusing on tracing.

Speaker: Dejice Jacob

In a sensor network, using sensor nodes with significant compute 
capability can enable flexible data collection, processing and reaction. This
can be done using commodity single-board computers. In this talk, we will be
describing initial deployment, software architecture and some preliminary analysis.

Speaker: Prof Greg Michaelson

In formalising denotational semantics, Strachey introduced a higher order update function for the modelling of stores, states and environments. This function relies solely on atomic equality types, lambda abstractions and conditions to represent stack disciplined association sequences as structured closures, without recourse to data structure constructs like lists.

Here, we present higher order functions that structure closures to model queue, linear ordered and tree disciplined look up functions, again built from moderately sugared pure lambda functions. We also discuss their type properties and practical implementation.

Speaker: John O'Donnell

Speaker: Mr Stan Manilov

Automatic parallelisation is an old research topic, but unfortunately, it
has always been over-promising and under-performing. In this talk, we'll
look at the main approaches towards automatically detecting parallelism in
legacy sequentialcode and we'll follow with some fresh ideas we're working
on, aiming to bring us beyond the ubiquitous dependence analysis.

Speaker: Tosan Atele-Williams

Speaker: Patrick Maier

The AJITPar project aims to automatically tune skeleton-based parallel
programs such that the task granularity falls within a range that
promises decent performance: Tasks should run long enough to amortise
scheduling overheads, but not too long.

In this talk, I will sketch how AJITPar uses dynamic cost models to
accurately estimate mean task runtimes, despite irregular task sizes.
The key is random scheduling and robust linear regression.

(Joint work with Magnus Morton and Phil Trinder.)

Speaker: Dr Rob Stewart

FPGAs are chips that can be reconfigured to exactly match the structure
of a specific algorithm. They are faster than CPUs and need less power
than GPUs, and hence are well suited for remote image processing needs.
They are however notoriously difficult to program, which is often done
by hardware experts working at a very low level. This excludes algorithm
designers across a range of real world domains from exploiting FPGA
technology. Moreover, time and space optimisation opportunities found in
compilers of high level languages cannot be applied to low level
hardware descriptions.

This talk will be in three parts. 1) I will present RIPL, our image
processing FPGA DSL. It comprises algorithmic skeletons influenced by
stream combinator languages, meaning the RIPL compiler is able to
generate space efficient hardware. 2) I will demonstrate our compiler
based dataflow transformations framework, which optimises the dataflow
IR form of RIPL programs before they are synthesised to FPGAs. 3) I will
describe the FPGA based smart camera architecture that RIPL programs
slot into, which is used for evaluation.

Speaker: Natalia Chechina

I’m going to give this talk at the end of November at BuildStuff developer conferences in Vilnius (Lithuania) and Kiev (Ukraine).  So it’s a bit skewed towards developer community rather than research community.  Any feedback will be very much appreciated.

I’ll talk about scalability and fault tolerance features of distributed Erlang. In particular, what makes it so good for large scale distributed applications on commodity hardware, where devices are inherently non-reliable and can disappear and re-appear at any moment.

The talk is based on experience of developing Scalable Distributed Erlang (SD Erlang -- a small extension of distributed Erlang for distributed scalability) and integrating Erlang in robotics. So, I’ll share rationale behind design decisions for SD Erlang, lessons learned, advantages, limitations, and plans for the further development. And then talk about benefits of Erlang in distributed robotics, initial findings, and plans.

Speaker: Prof Kevin Hammond

Evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS) play a critical role in many artificial intelligence applications that are in use today. This talk will describe a new parallel pattern for parallel EMAS computations, and its associated skeleton implementation, written in Erlang using the Skel library. The skeleton enables us to flexibly capture a wide variety of concrete evolutionary computations that can exploit the same underlying parallel implementation. The use of the skeleton is shown on two different evolutionary computing applications: i) computing the minimum of the Rastrigin function; and ii) solving an urban traffic optimization problem. We can obtain very good speedups (up to 142.44× the sequential performance) on a variety of different parallel hardware from Raspberry Pis to large-scale multicores and Xeon Phi accelerators, while requiring very little parallelisation effort.

Speaker: Blair Archibald

 I have recently returned from a summer working at EPCC, one of the
  largest high performance computing (HPC) centres in the UK. In this
  talk I'll give give a whirlwind tour of what I got up to during my
  time there!

  I'll start by describing EPCC itself and how it fits into the wider
  HPC community. Then will dive into two of the projects I was involved
  in over summer.

  Firstly, the Adept project which tackles the challenges presented by
  the need for energy efficient computing. This project relies heavily
  on custom hardware to gain fine grain knowledge of power usage. We
  will see how at how energy scales with parallel efficiency, the
  potential hidden cost of programming languages, and some interesting
  future research directions.

  Next, the ExaFLOW project aimed at providing the next generation of
  computational fluid dynamics codes (ready for the "Exa-scale" era).
  We will dive into mixed precision analysis and discover how we can
  analyse floating-point behaviour of scientific codes by way of binary
  instrumentation.

Speaker: Dr Mauro Dragone

Building smart spaces combining IoT technology and robotic
capabilities is an important and extended challenge for EU R&D&I, and a key
enabler for a range of advanced applications, such as home automation,
manufacturing, and ambient assisted living (AAL). In my talk I will provide an
overview of robotic ecologies, i.e. systems made up of sensors, actuators and
(mobile) robots that cooperate to accomplish complex tasks. I will discuss the
Robotic Ecology vision and highlight how it shares many similarities with the
Internet of Things (IoT): The ideal aim on both fronts is that arbitrary
combinations of devices should be able to be deployed in everyday environments,
and there efficiently provide useful services. However, while this has the
potential to deliver a range of disruptive services and address some of the
limitations of current IoT efforts, their effective realization necessitates
both novel software engineering solutions and artificial intelligence methods
to simplify their large scale application in real world settings. I will
illustrate these issues by focusing on the results of the EU project RUBICON
(fp7rubicon.eu). RUBICON built robotic ecologies that can learn to adapt to
changing and evolving requirements with minimum supervision. The RUBICON
approach builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics,
machine learning, wireless sensor networks and software engineering. I will
summarise the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outline
promising directions for future developments.

Biography:

Mauro Dragone is Assistant Professor with the Research Institute of Signals,
Sensors and Systems (ISSS), School of Engineering & Physical Sciences at
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Dr. Dragone gained more
than 12 years of experience as a software architect and project manager in the
software industry before his involvement with academia. His research expertise
includes robotics, human-robot interaction, wireless sensor networks and
software engineering. Dr. Dragone was involved in a number of EU projects
investigating Internet of Things (IoT) and intelligent control solutions for
smart environments, before initiating and leading the EU project RUBICON
(fp7rubicon.eu).

Speaker: Simon Jouet

OpenFlow has established itself as the defacto standard for Software Defined Networking (SDN) by separating the network's control and data planes. In this approach a central controller can alter the match-action pipeline of the individual switches using a limited set of fields and actions preventing. This inherent rigidity prevents the rapid introduction of new data plane functionality that would enable the design of new forwarding logic and other packet processing such as custom routing, telemetry, debugging, security, and quality of service.

In this talk I will present BPFabric a platform, protocol, and language-independent architecture to centrally program and monitor the data plane. It will cover the design of the switches and how they defer from "legacy" or OpenFlow switches and the design of a control API to orchestrate the infrastructure.

Speaker: Dr Boris Grot

Web-scale online services mandate fast access to massive quantities of
data. In practice, this is accomplished by sharding the datasets across a
pool of servers within a datacenter and keeping each shard within a
server's main memory to avoid long-latency disk I/O. Accesses to non-local
shards take place over the datacenter network, incurring communication
delays that are 20-1000x greater than accesses to local memory. In this
talk, I will introduce Scale-Out NUMA -- a rack-scale architecture with an
RDMA-inspired programming model that eliminates chief latency overheads of
existing networking technologies and reduces the remote memory access
latency to a small factor of local DRAM. I will overview key features of
Scale-Out NUMA and will describe how it can bridge the semantic gap
between software and hardware through integrated support for atomic object
reads.

Bio:

Boris Grot is a Lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of
Edinburgh. His research seeks to address efficiency bottlenecks and
capability shortcomings of processing platforms for big data. His recent
accomplishments include an IEEE Micro Top Pick and a Google Faculty
Research Award. Grot received his PhD in Computer Science from The
University of Texas at Austin and spent two years as a post-doctoral
fellow at the Parallel Systems Architecture Lab at EPFL.

Speaker: Phil Trinder

This session is essential for all members of the Systems Section. We will

• Meet new PhD students in the section
• Discuss progress since the Away Day
• Discuss strategic plans, including:
  • A Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) proposal
  • A high-profile Section Workshop as part of the School’s 60^th anniversary celebrations

 Feel free to propose other topics by email to Phil.Trinder@glasgow.ac.uk

Speaker: Phil Trinder

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the de facto standard middleware

for modern robots. However, communication between 

ROS nodes has scalability and reliability issues in practice. This talk reports 

an  investigation into whether Erlang’s lightweight concurrency

and reliability mechanisms have the potential to address these issues.

The basis of the investigation is a pair of simple but typical

robotic control applications, namely two face-trackers: one using

ROS publish/subscribe messaging, and the other a bespoke Erlang

communication framework.

The talk reports experiments that compare five key aspects of the ROS

and Erlang face trackers. We find that Erlang communication scales

better, supporting at least 3.5 times more active processes (700 processes)

than its ROS-based counterpart (200 nodes) while consuming

half of the memory. However, while both face tracking prototypes

exhibit similar detection accuracy and transmission latencies

with 10 or fewer workers, Erlang exhibits a continuous increase in

the total time taken to process a frame as more agents are added,

which we have identified is caused by function calls from Erlang

processes to Python modules via ErlPort. A reliability study shows

that while both ROS and Erlang restart failed computations, the

Erlang processes restart 1000–1500 times faster than ROS nodes,

reducing robot component downtime and mitigating the impact of

the failures.

Joint work with Andreea Lutac, Natalia Chechina, and Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa

Speaker: Jeremy Singer

This week, our Functional Programming in Haskell course began. We have around 4000 learners signed up for this massive open online course. Wim and I have spent the past six months developing the learning materials, mostly adapted from the traditional Functional Programming 4 course.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the challenges involved in setting up and running an online course. In short, hard work but very rewarding!

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-haskell/1

Speaker: Professor Saji Hameed

This old saying among weather forecasters is correct. Yet it does give little insight into the workings of the climate system.  While weather can be understood and simulated as instabilities arising within  the atmosphere,  climate involves interactions and exchanges of properties among a wide variety of subsystems that include for example the atmosphere, the ocean and land subsystems. I will first discuss an example of these interactions at play showcasing the El Nino phenomenon.  In the rest of the talk, I will endeavor to describe how software for climate models integrates experiences and expertise  across a wide range of disciplines and the computational challenges faced by the climate modeling community in doing so.

Biography: Professor Hameed is a Senior Associate Professor at the University of Aizu in Fukushima, Japan. He was the Director of Science at APCC, Korea and has been appointed a Senior Visiting Scientist at Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTECH).

He is credited with the discovery of an ocean-atmosphere coupled mode "Indian Ocean Dipole" which radically changed the prevailing paradigms. At APCC he pioneered an information technology based approach for generating and distributing climate information for societal benefit. He has also worked with APCC and its international partners to develop a climate prediction based approach to managing severe haze and forest fires in Southeast Asia, a severe environmental pollution issue in the area. He is also closely working with scientists at the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (Japan) to apply climate and weather science for renewable energy applications.

His current work includes investigating Super El Nino using computational modeling approaches, analyzing climate data using machine learning algorithms, tracking clouds and rain with low cost GPS chips, and continuing investigation into Indian Ocean Dipole that affects global climate.

Speaker: Marc Roper

In recent years, software testing research has produced notable advances in the area of automated test data generation. It is now possible to take an arbitrary system and automatically generate volumes of high-quality test data. But the problem of checking the correctness or otherwise of the outputs (termed the "oracle problem") still remains.
This talk examines how machine learning techniques can be used to cluster and classify test outputs to separate failing and passing cases.
The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated and shown to have the potential to reduce by an order of magnitude the numbers of outputs that need to be examined following a test run.

This is joint work carried out with Rafig Almaghairbe

Biography: Dr Marc Roper is a Reader in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde. He has an extensive background in software engineering, particularly in understanding and addressing the problems associated with designing, testing, and evolving large software systems. Much of his research has incorporated significant empirical investigations: either based around controlled participant-based experiments or through the the analysis of open-source systems and large-scale repositories. His more recent work has explored the application of search-based strategies and machine learning techniques to software engineering problems such as test data generation, the identification of security anomalies, and automatic fault detection. His current interests lie in the area of software analytics, in particular building models of software systems behaviour to automatically identify and locate faults.