Arm supports academic research and recognizes the importance of maintaining strong links between academia and industry for continued research innovation. As part of this mission, Arm Research Collaborations have established seven Centres of Excellence (CoE), broadening research opportunities and strengthening links through a range of activities. Including sponsoring students completing their PhDs.Part of a blog series, we take a look at the inspirational work each of our Centres are undertaking, fueling research success and collaboration between academia and industry.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) – Arm Research CoE was formed to recognize the leadership and hard work in pioneering Arm in High Performance Compute (HPC), an essential tool for international competitiveness in science and engineering. The successful EU-funded MontBlanc project is testament to our partnership in this area. BSC has been fostering HPC in Spain and Europe since its establishment in 2005, and they are currently focused on four application areas: Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Computer Applications in Science and Engineering.
Arm Research Collaborations are currently sponsoring two students at BSC. Their research topics are very different, but reflect the diverse potential of the Arm-BSC collaboration: genome sequencing, and smart memory controllers.
Rubén’s research has three primary goals:
Rubén’s objective is to review the proposal of new SVE instructions, helping to speed up workloads, and evaluate the modified algorithms using simulation tools. Rubén is undertaking his Master’s degree at UPC (BSC’s partner university), while also working as a research student at BSC. His final degree project looked into optimizing molecular dynamics applications, so we are intrigued to see what his current research project discovers!
“Genomics and Transcriptomics are not only two of the main research areas enabling and accelerating bleeding edge biomedical research, they are at the core of the upcoming personalized medicine revolution. For that, we are generating more biological data than any other kind of data, and vast amounts of data require a vast amount of compute. This project deals with sequence alignment, which is a fundamental and very computationally taxing part of genomics and transcriptomics analysis. In the next few years, sequence alignment may become one of the most important computational workloads out there, and Arm Research is excited by this opportunity to optimize and co-design the algorithms and architecture to best support it." Javier Setoain – Staff Research Engineer, Arm Research
“Genomics and Transcriptomics are not only two of the main research areas enabling and accelerating bleeding edge biomedical research, they are at the core of the upcoming personalized medicine revolution. For that, we are generating more biological data than any other kind of data, and vast amounts of data require a vast amount of compute. This project deals with sequence alignment, which is a fundamental and very computationally taxing part of genomics and transcriptomics analysis.
In the next few years, sequence alignment may become one of the most important computational workloads out there, and Arm Research is excited by this opportunity to optimize and co-design the algorithms and architecture to best support it."
Javier Setoain – Staff Research Engineer, Arm Research
Adrián is well known to Arm Research, having completed two internships with our memory team. He is completing a PhD in Computer Architecture with BSC, and his research project is within smart memory. Sparse and irregular memory accesses are critical for many applications, such as molecular dynamics and data analytics. In these scenarios, the memory hierarchy offers limited benefit as data locality cannot be successfully exploited by the hardware. Consequently, they represent a challenge for current and future architectures. In the project, Adrian will study existing approaches that perform computation near memory (PIM) and propose new solutions. In particular, he will be designing a programmable accelerator connected to the memory controller that performs data layout transformation (DLT) and computes.
“Data movement is known to dominate computation for many important workloads; this student’s work feeds into our research pipeline and has the potential to offer significant performance and efficiency benefits across the Arm ecosystem.” Jonathan Beard – Principal Research Engineer, Arm Research
“Data movement is known to dominate computation for many important workloads; this student’s work feeds into our research pipeline and has the potential to offer significant performance and efficiency benefits across the Arm ecosystem.”
Jonathan Beard – Principal Research Engineer, Arm Research
Our Centres of Excellence are just one way that we collaborate with academia and industry. Find out more about our Collaborations team and how we are helping shape the industry, and read our recent blogs highlighting the work we do. In terms of tools and support, we can also provide research access to IP and technical support. This allows our partners and future collaborators the chance to work with and understand our vision at Arm, helping us build the future of technology.
Learn more about Arm Research Collaborations
This post represents one of Arm Research’s Centres of Excellence. Click the following link to find out about our other established Centres of Excellence: