Tackling the software crisis

Monday 7 September 2015

RePhrase-Supercomputer-funding-mainbody

The University of St Andrews has secured €3.5M from the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme to study advanced computing.

The RePhrase project brings together eight leading academic and industry partners from the UK, Austria, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Israel, including American multinational technology and consulting corporation IBM.

This latest tranche of EU funding, which will keep the University in the forefront of software technology, follows on from the highly successful €4.2 EU ParaPhrase project which brought together academic and industrial experts from across Europe to improve the programmability and performance of modern parallel computing technologies.

The latest project, again led by St Andrews Professor Kevin Hammond, aims to tackle one of the most pressing problems in computer science: how to produce effective software for emerging “parallel” computer platforms that promise significantly increased performance at significantly reduced cost and energy usage.

Future computers will consist of thousands or even millions of processors, which poses a real problem to traditional programmers. The sheer complexity of these systems means that powerful tools are needed to develop software that runs stably and efficiently while making the most of the ability to process in parallel.

This will help enable “green computing” as well as powering the next generation of software app and major industry applications.

Professor Hammond said: “This is really exciting. I am proud to be leading such a great team. By taking on this project, St Andrews will be at the forefront of software technology.

“We will be able to study fundamental issues in software engineering for parallel programming and apply them to real-world problems. The potential academic and commercial impact of this work is immense.”

The RePhrase project started on 1 April 2015 and runs for three years. It is funded by the European Union as grant number 644235 under the Horizon 2020 research programme.

Picture illustrates a computational fluid dynamics simulation that is used for scientific research by the project partners, and which can also be used to predict flows of fluids or air in, eg, car/aircraft aerodynamics; flows of oil, water etc through pipelines; internal combustion engine properties; air conditioning etc.  


Notes to news editors

The project partners are: University of St Andrews, UK (coordinator); IBM Research, Haifa, Israel; Programming Research Ltd, UK; EvoPro Innovation Ltd, Hungary; Software Competence Centre Hagenberg GmbH, Austria; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain; Ciber del Area de Salud Mental Consorcio, Spain; University of Pisa, Italy

For further information, please see: Paraphrase and RePhrase

Images are available. Professor Hammond is available for interview. Contact Communications Office.

Issued by the University of St Andrews Communications Office, contactable on 01334 467310 or [email protected].


Category Research

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