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Nick Brown

@nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social
169 followers 124 following 105 posts

Senior Research Fellow @epcc.bsky.social, University of Edinburgh. Interested in novel architectures, HPC, FPGAs, RISC-V, programming language design and LLVM & MLIR.

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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
My @epcc.bsky.social PhD student Jake Davies produced a @tenstorrent.bsky.social video giving a walkthrough of the Tensix architecture, explaining how it works and how AI/ML workloads are mapped to it. Everything he wished he knew when he started working with the hardware! youtu.be/WcljPiCl5eM?...
youtu.be
Tenstorrent Tensix Core Explained | AI Accelerator Architecture
YouTube video by Jake
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Tobias Weinzierl @tobiasweinzierl.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
My @cake-dri.bsky.social colleague @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social gives an enthusiastic talk on RISC-V. Nice to see and hear about the different pathways of ARM and RISC-V.
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
@tobiasweinzierl.bsky.social kicks off day two at #PPAM giving a keynote on task based models for simulating black holes, providing important efficiency on CPUs and GPUs if leveraged correctly
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Great first day at #PPAM, had lots of fun in Poznań running on PCSS's quantum computer as part of their quantum tutorial
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
It was great to visit OpenChip last week in Barcelona, presenting on the latest developments in #RISCV for #HPC, inc some takeaways from #ISC, and discussing research opportunities to help inform next-generation computing
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Thanks #HPCwire for the write up of our #risc_v #BoF session at #ISC26. One reason I organise this each year is that getting feedback/criticism from the #HPC community keeps us honest and ensures we aren't preaching to the already converted. www.hpcwire.com/2026/07/20/c...
hpcwire.com
Charting RISC-V’s Future in HPC - HPCwire
There are more than 30 billion RISC-V cores deployed in the world, and some analysts estimate the open processor architecture will own a third of the market within five years. While the forecasted fut...
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Our session on #ai for #hpc at #pasc26 continues with @ncar-ucar.bsky.social 's Monica Morrison exploring tension between #ai capability and the responsible & ethical side. Many in the audience are not optimistic, and think in the short term advancing capability will dominate
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Ben Shipway, head of dynamics research group @metoffice.gov.uk and leader of scientific development of LFRic kicks off the #pasc26 mini symposium on #AI and #HPC, plan is will replace physics models for some parts of the system but need to keep an eye on the details
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Albert Reuther gives a great talk at #HPCDays about #hpc at #mit #llsc, explaining how user behaviour has driven their interests and more generally with potentially some of the first interactive computing happening way back when in the lab
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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Durham HPC Days 2026 (15–19 June) will bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners to explore the frontiers of HPC, data analysis & scientific innovation. Look out for EPCC colleagues across the programme: edin.ac/4xdODIE
Montage promoting Durham HPC Days 2026
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Rich Neale, my @epcc.bsky.social PhD student, has a poster today at #RISCVSummit exploring ET-SoC-1 for #hpc and exploring what the term "transputer" means wrt modern architectures. Thanks to #Ainekk0 for access to the hardware, some really interesting early performance PDE solver results
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Last year the #riscv #HPC SIG published a gap analysis, with #lustre parallel file system a high priority. #openchip picked this up and have done a fantastic job getting #riscv support upstreamed in #lustre. Really nice summary at #RISCVSummit, showcasing ecosystem progress
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Really interesting talks by Yiftach from @nextsilicon.com about the Arbel #riscv core and wider plan for large core count CPU at #RISCVSummit . He even had a physical Arbel-based CPU with him to show.
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Interesting @riscv.org.web.brid.gy summit so far, a buzz around server grade #riscv CPUs. Been a bit of an RVA23 hardware winter recently, but concrete vendor announcements this week feel like good progress is being made towards 2026 high performance hardware
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Our paper "Lifting to tensors when compiling scientific computing workloads for AI Engines" presented at #CCGrid today, a compiler flow for #AMD #AIE which lifts Fortran+OpenMP to tensors & then leverages for efficient execution on the #NPU. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.03566
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
#CCGrid in Sydney starts today, exciting technical programme ahead this week exploring intersection of #HPC, cloud and edge. My highlight so far is seeing a kangaroo for the first time 😀
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Great to see #xDSL featured on @github.com's maintainers month. Starting life as an #ExCALIBUR project led by Tobias Grosser, it has an active research & industry userbase and is a really useful framework for compiler development. maintainermonth.github.com/academia/xds...
maintainermonth.github.com
Maintainer Spotlight: xDSL
An accessible, high-productivity compiler framework for experienced and new compiler developers, compatible with MLIR and used in academia and industry for teaching, research, and production compiler ...
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I am advertising for a fully funded 3.5 year PhD (with enhanced yearly stipend) exploring accelerating HPC algorithms on AI accelerators such as including @cerebrassystems.bsky.social and @tenstorrent.bsky.social . Come join @epcc.bsky.social, the UK national supercomputing centre.
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
@epcc.bsky.social 's David Henty explores performance comparison at #CUG for minikab cg benchmark. Comparing ARCHER2 (AMD zen2, Slingshot 10) vs Cirrus (AMD zen5, Slingshot 11). Newer machine around 3.5 times faster per node
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
The French Riviera is a great location for #CrayUserGroup this year. Interesting first day of tutorials and bofs, and was a pleasure to introduce @epcc.bsky.social 's #AI factory antenna and good discussions in the session about the role of #AI more generally
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Tobias Weinzierl @tobiasweinzierl.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
We will host a @vi-hps.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy in about a month. Would be great to see a wide variety of communities. The workshop is, as always, organised in collaboration with the performance analysis tool developers themselves under the umbrella of the HAI-End / @shareing.bsky.social
vi-hps.org
VI-HPS :: Tuning Workshop Series :: TW49
49th VI-HPS Tuning Workshop (Durham University, UK)
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
It was an honour today to give a keynote at the #XuanTie #RISCV community conference in Shanghai. Talking about #hpc , the importance of the c920 and some early benchmarking of their latest c950 which looks like an impressive @riscv.org.web.brid.gy capability
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
The best thing about travelling into central Shanghai from the airport is that it's a great excuse to ride the maglev
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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Looking for funding opportunities across UK DRI? A range of resources and funding schemes are currently available to support activities and projects. Explore what’s on offer by visiting the website of CAKE, the Computational Abilities Knowledge ExchangeNetwork+ : cake.ac.uk/funds/
cake.ac.uk
CAKE
The CAKE Network+ facilitates knowledge exchange and sustainable collaboration across the UK Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) communities.
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Excited our paper on stencil compiler for @cerebrassystems.bsky.social #WSE has been accepted to ASPLOS . Using MLIR, without any code changes across three frontends we have highly competative performance against manually written code and around 14x performance of 128 A100 GPUs.
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Recurring theme of @hipeac.bsky.social this week has been the intersection of compilers and architectures to address challenges in #ai, especially llm. Really exciting when @jocare.bsky.social announced #HiPEAC 2027 will be held in Glasgow!
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
In Krakow this week for @hipeac.bsky.social , Teresa from #BSC kicking off the #RISCV for #HPC workshop, a day of interesting talks and discussions
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
My PhD student Gabriel had a busy time at #SC25 and has written up his experiences, especially presenting a couple of papers leveraging #MLIR for #FPGAs. One at the LLVM workshop on a Fortran+OpenMP flow for #Xilinx #FPGAs and another at H2RC workshop on a Fortran intrinsics flow for AI engines
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
There are lots of exciting #HPC and #AI projects going on at @epcc.bsky.social , with quite a few more to start in 2026. Come join us!
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Thanks @kieranleach.bsky.social for doing a great tour of the @epcc.bsky.social #ACF facility for Christian from @unipaderborn.bsky.social and @stevenwright.bsky.social from @yorkuniversity.bsky.social. I always learn a lot from these, and was great to see the new #Cirrus on its 1st day of service
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Many congratulations to my @epcc.bsky.social PhD student Mark Klaisoongnoen who passed his PhD viva today! Exploring accelerating financial workloads on #FPGAs, Mark researched techniques for improving performance & energy efficiency. The U280 was a prop only, he doesn't get to keep it ;)
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Tobias Weinzierl @tobiasweinzierl.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Nick Brown from @epcc.bsky.social is up now.
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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Attending #CIUK25? Our colleagues are looking forward to meeting you! Find us at the stands for ARCHER2-Cirrus and the CAKE Network Plus. EPCC at #CIUK2025:https://edin.ac/4pR8dpL
ARCHER2-Cirrus stand at CIUK25CAKE stand at CIUK25
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Very cool, a home made Motorola 68k system on breadboard with 512KB of RAM and booting Linux from ROM. Hooked up and specialised by Jeremy Cohen from Imperial based on design by Steve Chamberlin. Running Linux to play Colossal Cave Adventure over uart
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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
It's our last day at #SC25! @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social and Gabriel Rodriguez-Canal will present their paper 'Programmer productivity and performance on AMD's AI Engines: Offloading Fortran intrinsics via MLIR a case-study'. Find them in 263-264 at 9:38am CST.
SC25 logo
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Well-done to my PhD student Gabriel Rodriguez-Canal @epcc.bsky.social who gave a great talk about our work support Fortran intrinsics on #AMD #AIEs at #SC25 #H2RC. The first step in #AIE Fortran support. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114…
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Fascinating talk by Ilan Tayari from @nextsilicon.com at #SC25 #H2RC about Maverick 2. Based on dataflow help solving the issue with traditional architectures around (very) low ALU occupancy, their architecture will move #HPC away from Von Neumann architecture
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
I really enjoyed chairing the panel on an open #HPC ecosystem at #SC25 Thanks to @fclc.bsky.social from @tenstorrent.bsky.social , Teresa from @bsc-cns.bsky.social, Tony from #Redhat, Daniele from #E4computer-engineering and Penporn from @developers.google.com
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Was really great to meet @jeffgeerling.com at the @epcc.bsky.social booth at #SC25, we had a fascinating chat and I was really inspiring to hear about some of Jeff's projects and activities. Also really cool to chat with him about our Raspberry PI mini supercomputer #WeeArchie
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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Attending #SC25? See our website for all our SC activities: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/whats-happen...
SC25 logo
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Well done to my @epcc.bsky.social PhD student Gabriel Rodriguez-Canal who presented his paper at the #LLVM #SC25 workshop today on an MLIR-based Fortran & OpenMP flow for #AMD #FPGAs. Preprint at arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08713
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
A wide range of talks so far this morning at the @riscv.org.web.brid.gy #SC25 workshop. Driving analogue systems from #RISCV, coupling with spiking neural networks, and profiling tooling all demonstrates the flexibility the technology gives us to do cool things
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Shashank Nemawarkar from #condorcomputing, part of #andes , kicks off the @riscv.org.web.brid.gy workshop at #SC25 talking about #hpc CPU design. Lots of interesting talks ahead this morning.
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Michèle Weiland @micheleweiland.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
Steve Dean from HPE kicking off the “Sustainable Supercomputing” workshop at #SC25 - the room is pretty packed already, but there are a few more seats in room 264 if you want to join. Lots of interesting presentations still to come!
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
Was great to visit @ncar-cisl.bsky.social last week in Boulder and Cheyenne, we have a centre to centre collaboration via the #EPSRC #CONTINENTS project and they have some really impressive facilities and work. Great discussions ahead of then travelling to St. Louis for #SC25 this week
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Adrian Jackson @adrianjhpc.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
The @epcc.bsky.social #SC25 booth starting to go up, hanging sign and all
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Thanks @riscv.org.web.brid.gy publishing my article highlighting #RISCV activities coming up at #SC25 this week, a workshop on Monday morning showcasing some of the latest developments and then a panel on adopting a fully open #HPC ecosystem on Thursday 1:30pm riscv.org/blog/risc-v-...
riscv.org
We’re Showcasing RISC-V at SC25, the World’s Largest Supercomputing Conference
I’m heading to SC25 in St. Louis next week to advocate for the growing role of RISC-V in high-performance computing (HPC), alongside my peers in the RISC-V HPC special interest group (SIG).
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EPCC @epcc.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
In this article, EPCC's @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social writes about the work behind #SC25 sessions on #RISCV, novel and emerging architectures, and the Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange network (CAKE). edin.ac/48a229Z
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
It's going to be great catching up with lots of #HPC people next week at #SC25 . #Supercomputing is always a busy week, I wrote up some of the activities I am involved in www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/whats-happen...
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Nick Brown @nickbrown-hpc.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Thanks @riscv.org.web.brid.gy for the invite to give a keynote at #RISCVSummit a couple of weeks ago. We have seen great progress in #RISCV for #HPC, and given promises by vendors and progress in the sw ecosystem I predict that 2026 could be a watershed year. youtu.be/ItA-NS4vxsU?...
youtu.be
Keynote: Reimagining the Future of High Performance Computing Catalysed by RISC-V - Nick Brown
YouTube video by RISC-V International
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