Undergraduates quick to grasp multicore concurrency

University interns at XMOS, the creator of Software Defined Silicon, are producing complete applications based on the company's first multi-core programmable device, the XS1-G4, within a matter of days. The speed with which undergraduates, with no prior knowledge of concurrent processing environments, have developed a variety of complex consumer product applications has staggered the Bristol based outfit.

David May, CTO at XMOS said, “While one of Software Defined Silicon prime objectives was certainly to remove the development time issues associated with existing programmable technologies, we've frankly been amazed by just how little time our students have actually needed to create some quite amazing applications, from wireless robots and web servers through to GPS and RFID systems. This is a reassuring sign for industry, as rapid adoption of programmable multicore processing technology will be vital to future consumer product design, for reasons of processing speed, power consumption and time to market."

He continued,“The sequential processing mindset thats still prevalent in certain sectors of industry and academia means that multicore and concurrent processing is still a subject thats simply not taught in many universities. New thinking is needed and its been a real pleasure this summer seeing the ease with which undergraduates have got to grips with a completely new concurrent multicore processor architecture and programming environment they have become student pioneers of multicore applications programming!"

The XMOS university interns have been drawn from electronics, computer science and computer systems engineering courses primarily at the University of Bristol. A number have recently graduated and have been made permanent employees. One, Jason Mayes, is one of three nominees for the IET Award for the Best IT Student in the forthcoming 2008 Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards.

XMOS CTO David May with his team of university interns student pioneers of multicore applications programming.