About me
Officially, I am a graduate from the university of York, with a masters degree in electronic engineering. Unofficially, I am a tinkerer and maker of things. What kind of things? Well, for as long as I can remember I have been building things; from blast furnaces in the back garden as kid, to home-brew electronics as a teenager, to computers, networks, clusters and all manner of software as a young adult.
My longest term interest by far though has been processor architecture. I designed my first processor almost by accident. I was, at the time, intensely interested in digital arithmetic. The idea that wires and circuits could be used to perform mathematical operations, just like a human being could, was intoxicating to me. In any case, I was a few iterations into the design of a sequential multiplier circuit, when I realised I could replace my control logic with a block of memory and encode arbitrary sequences of operations. The rest, as they say, is history.
During my final year at York, I crystallised my processor architecture knowledge. For my masters project I endeavoured to design a novel many-core processor architecture from the ground up, built to allow efficient exploitation of fine-grain parallelism in ordinary code. The kind of which is difficult to achieve on traditional multi-core processors due to various overheads in both processor and operating system. The meat of the project involved designing a piece of software to simulate the proposed architecture so that it could be tested. The project went well enough, and was well graded, but I was never particularly satisfied with it for a number of reasons. Perhaps more on that at a later date.
Throughout all my projects though, one thing I never saw fit to do was to document them. The notion that others would even be interested, that it would make me look more attractive to prospective employers, or that it might just be a fulfilling exercise in and of itself, never really crossed my mind. Which brings me to today, sitting behind my desk, drafting the first page for this blog.
In any case, going forward, this place will become a repository for all my projects. Ongoing, finished, success or failure. And I hope that you, the reader, at least find something interesting to read here.
My longest term interest by far though has been processor architecture. I designed my first processor almost by accident. I was, at the time, intensely interested in digital arithmetic. The idea that wires and circuits could be used to perform mathematical operations, just like a human being could, was intoxicating to me. In any case, I was a few iterations into the design of a sequential multiplier circuit, when I realised I could replace my control logic with a block of memory and encode arbitrary sequences of operations. The rest, as they say, is history.
During my final year at York, I crystallised my processor architecture knowledge. For my masters project I endeavoured to design a novel many-core processor architecture from the ground up, built to allow efficient exploitation of fine-grain parallelism in ordinary code. The kind of which is difficult to achieve on traditional multi-core processors due to various overheads in both processor and operating system. The meat of the project involved designing a piece of software to simulate the proposed architecture so that it could be tested. The project went well enough, and was well graded, but I was never particularly satisfied with it for a number of reasons. Perhaps more on that at a later date.
Throughout all my projects though, one thing I never saw fit to do was to document them. The notion that others would even be interested, that it would make me look more attractive to prospective employers, or that it might just be a fulfilling exercise in and of itself, never really crossed my mind. Which brings me to today, sitting behind my desk, drafting the first page for this blog.
In any case, going forward, this place will become a repository for all my projects. Ongoing, finished, success or failure. And I hope that you, the reader, at least find something interesting to read here.
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