Research Assistant/Associate in Simulation and Exploration of Next-Generation AI Hardware (Fixed Term)

Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 3 years. 

Applications are invited for a full-time Research Assistant/Associate to work on the simulation and exploration of next-generation AI hardware designs. 

The UK's Advanced Research Invention Agency (ARIA) is supporting an ambitious programme of work that aims to reduce the hardware costs associated with training AI models by more than 1000x. 

The objective of our project, funded within this programme, is to develop a scalable and modular simulation framework. This will require multiple levels of simulation focused at different system layers and levels of fidelity. A key goal is to allow novel hardware ideas to be easily incorporated and evaluated, i.e. to aid the development of next-generation hardware for GenAI. 

The work at Cambridge (and Imperial) will focus on the simulation of the accelerator hardware. To guarantee simulation fidelity, we will perform cross-validation of our simulation with real FPGA implementations. This will require modelling of both compute hardware and memory subsystems. 

There is significant scope for research into the design of such simulation environments, for example (but not limited to): hardware for training Transformers, techniques to allow novel ideas to be specified, modelled and prototyped quickly, methods for rapid and intelligent design-space exploration and optimisation, machine-learning based tools for the rapid and interactive interpretation and analysis of results, new methods to automatically generate and validate simulation models at different levels of fidelity and techniques for high-performance simulation. 

The team at Cambridge will consist of three investigators: Prof. Robert Mullins (PI), Prof. Timothy Jones and Dr Rika Antonova, three PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher. The project is led by Dr. Yiren Zhao at Imperial College, who will be supported by Prof. George Constantinides and Prof. Wayne Luk. The team also includes Dr. Mai Luo and Prof. Michael O'Boyle from the University of Edinburgh. Overall, there will be great opportunities for collaboration between more than a dozen PhD students and post-doctoral researchers working on this project at Imperial, University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. 

Appointment at Research Associate level is dependent on having a PhD. Those who have submitted but not yet received their PhD will be appointed at Research Assistant level, which will be amended to Research Associate once the PhD has been awarded. 

The Department of Computer Science and Technology is an academic department that encompasses computer science along with many aspects of engineering, technology and mathematics. We have a world-wide reputation for academic research with consistent top research ratings. The Department has an open and collaborative culture, supporting revolutionary fundamental computer science research, strong cross-cutting collaborations internally and externally, and ideas which transform computing outside the University. Please follow the link at: https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk to find out more about our Department. 

Please ensure that you upload a covering letter and a CV in the Upload section of the online application. The covering letter should outline how you match the criteria for the post and why you are applying for this role. If you upload any additional documents which have not been requested, we will not be able to consider these as part of your application. 

The University actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion and encourages applications from all sections of society. 

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