
Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith
Current positions
Professor in High Performance Computing
School of Computer Science
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
- Performance portablity
- Application-based fault tolerance (ABFT)
- New algorithms for novel architectures
- Heterogeneous, many-core processor architectures, including GPUs, Xeon Phi, FPGAs, DSPs etc.
- Scaling applications to run on millions of cores (Exascale computing)
Biography
- Senior Lecturer in High Performance Computing and Architectures at the University of Bristol
- Chair of the Many-core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Conference (MRSC)
- Member of EPSRC's new Research Infrastructure Strategic Advisory Team (since 2011)
- Member of EPSRC's resource allocation panel (RAP) for HECToR
- Member of the programme committee for IEEE/ACM SuperComputing 2010
- Part of the International Exascale Software Project from April 2010
- Technical expert in the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI) since November 2010
- Member of the programme committee for the International Supercomputing Conference
- Member of the programme committee for the Programmability Issues for Heterogeneous Multicores (MULTIPROG-2011) workshop, part of HiPEAC '11
- Member of the programme committee for the Second International Conference on Energy-Aware High Performance Computing
- Member of the University of Bristol's HPC executive and technical advisory board
Expertise
I have fifteen years of experience in industry designing and programming some of the world's fastest parallel processors using many-core and multi-core techniques. These processors were developed for High Performance Computing (HPC) and embedded Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications. Research interests include using the latest graphics processors (GPUs) to solve important computational problems in HPC and using parallel programming languages such as OpenMP, MPI, OpenCL and CUDA. Applications of interest are generally within the life sciences space, such as genome sequencing, molecular dynamics (e.g. protein folding and drug docking), and also quantum chemistry. I am also interested in the issues of scaling super computers to millions of processors.
- High Performance Computing
- HPC
- GPU computing
- GPGPU
- many-core processors
- multi-core processors
- computer architecture
Keywords
- Power efficient computing
- algorithms
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
8025 - Isambard AI
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Engineering Faculty OfficeDates
01/11/2023 to 31/03/2025
8025 - Isambard AI - INCOME ONLY
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Engineering Faculty OfficeDates
01/11/2023 to 31/03/2025
8025 - Isambard AI - Operations
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Engineering Faculty OfficeDates
01/11/2023 to 31/03/2024
8025 - Isambard AI - Power Related
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Engineering Faculty OfficeDates
01/11/2023 to 31/03/2025
8025 - Isambard AI - Pre-planning expenditure
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Engineering Faculty OfficeDates
01/11/2023 to 31/03/2025
Thesis supervisions
Abstractions for Portable Data Management in Heterogeneous Memory Systems
Supervisors
On the Porting and Optimisation of Physics Simulations for Heterogeneous Parallel Processors
Supervisors
Leveraging Many-Core Technology for Deterministic Neutral Particle Transport at Extreme Scale
Supervisors
Enabling task parallelism for many-core architectures
Supervisors
Accelerated Sampling Methods for High Dimensional Molecular Systems
Supervisors
Modern vector architectures for high-performance computing
Supervisors
Early-exit neural networks in low-cost reconfigurable devices
Supervisors
Publications
Recent publications
08/01/2025AI-Assisted Design-Space Analysis of High-Performance Arm Processors
Proceedings of SC 2024-W
A Metric for HPC Programming Model Productivity
SC24-W: Workshops of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Assessing the GPU Offload Threshold of GEMM and GEMV Kernels on Modern Heterogeneous HPC Systems
15th IEEE International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems
Optimisation and Evaluation of Breadth First Search with oneAPI/SYCL on Intel FPGAs
Proceedings of International Workshop on OpenCL and SYCL, IWOCL 2024
An Empirical Comparison of the RISC-V and AArch64 Instruction Sets
SC-W '23