Murray Cole

Email: mic@inf.ed.ac.uk
Phone: 0131 650 5154
Room 1.18
Informatics Forum,
10 Crichton Street
Edinburgh, EH8 9AB

Research interests

I'm a member of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture with an interest in parallel programming models, emphasising approaches which exploit "skeletons" to package well known patterns of computation and interaction as customisable frameworks. Recent efforts have focused on the eSkel and Enhance projects, which investigate these ideas in the contexts of single machine parallelism and Grid computing respectively. Current interests include the exploitation of skeletons in manycore and transactional settings.

You can find a list of my publications, or look up details of the like-minded people in Edinburgh who form the Structured Parallelism Group. I'm also a member of the Compiler and Architecture Design Group. I maintain the skeletons homepage. You might care to glance at, and indeed agree with, the overheads on Why Structured Parallel Programming Matters from my invited talk to Euro-Par 2004, or check out the special issue on algorithmic skeletons of the journal Parallel Computing, from September 2006, which I co-edited with Herbert Kuchen.

I am on the Steering Committee of NAIS, the Centre for Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software. The Centre was established in 2009 as a joint project of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde Universities. Its primary objective is to introduce and develop a new paradigm for high performance computation based on the combination of advanced annotation and machine learning compilers, and to apply it to a range of challenging state of the art numerical applications areas. NAIS is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Scottish Funding Council

Other things that keep me busy

In the current academic year I give courses on Design and Analysis of Parallel Algorithms and Parallel Programming Languages and Systems to our final year Honours and MSc class. I am Director of Studies to a subset of our undergraduates, doing my best to keep them on the academic straight and narrow, and have a number of other bureaucratic roles that you don't want to know about.

Away from the world of Computer Science I am a (sadly, non-playing) member of the oldest football club in the world and a (sadly, playing) member of the oldest golf club in Penicuik. I also chair the Parents' Association at Penicuik High School.