Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA)

Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Research Overview

The Flexible Architecture and Networking group (the FAN Club) is concerned with issues that arise from increasing fuzziness between the boundaries of hardware and software, and computation and communication. More specifically, the flexibility of interest arises from:

the ability to treat circuits as being "soft" (like programs), no longer constrained by physical hardware with lengthy design processes; and
the ability to treat communication protocols as being "soft", no longer constrained by fixed and lengthy standardisation by human committees.

The group pursues research concerned with these types of flexibility, together with work uniting both, to yield novel implementation techniques for computer networking applications. The strands of research are:

Soft circuitry (the "FPGA stuff")
Soft protocols (the "comms stuff")
Flexible architecture for networking applications

FAN Club members

Gordon Brebner (president)
Michael Dales
Daniel Denning
Alex Eros
John Gray
Steven Haeck
Tim Hopkins
Irwin Kennedy
Robin Metcalfe
David Rees
Shi Zhong
Adam Donlin (notable old boy)
Damian Kwok (notable old boy)
Rob Payne (notable old boy)

Gordon Brebner, questions to <gordon@dcs.ed.ac.uk>, 29 September 2000