PhD in Computer Arithmetic and Numerical Analysis

Eligibility: UK and International

Funding

A highly competitive School of Computing Studentship offering the award of fees at the UK fee rate of £4,786 or Non-UK fee rate of £29,250, together with a tax-free maintenance grant of £19,237 per year for 3.5 years.

Lead Supervisor’s full name & email address: Dr Mantas Mikaitis – m.mikaitis@leeds.ac.uk

Co-supervisor name(s) & email address(s): TBC

Project summary

In 1985 a floating-point standard has been introduced, which, among multiple things, defined a set of required and recommended arithmetic operations and mathematical functions. It is the most important standard in the history of computing. Most computer processors and mathematical libraries adopted the standard, which in turn improved reproducibility between different versions of hardware or even between hardware from different vendors.

For decades the behaviour of 64-bit (double precision) and 32-bit (single precision) arithmetic has been relatively stable and predictable, with software developers being confident in achieving bit reproducibility in most cases. Today the TOP500 supercomputer list contains about 160 machines with NVIDIA or AMD vector and matrix arithmetic operations, which diverge from the IEEE 754. Furthermore, rounding methods that are not standard, such as stochastic rounding, are being included in hardware: Graphcore IPU, Amazon Trainium, and Tesla Dojo chips. Most of the low precision arithmetic, despite being introduced for machine learning, is used in scientific computing in general. Therefore, it is important to understand the effects of this non-standard hardware on applications and develop approaches to best utilize it.

Prospective PhD researchers will work on developing methods to understand non-standard low- and mixed-precision hardware and on numerically accurate algorithms that utilize the hardware to gain speed up.

New postgraduate researchers will become members of Leeds Mathematical Software and Hardware lab, with opportunities to work alongside and communicate with other postgraduate researchers and academics of the Visualisation and Computer Graphics, Scientific Computation, Distributed Systems and Services, and other groups within the School.

Start date: 1^st February 2025

Please state your entry requirements plus any necessary or desired background

Must hold 1st Class Bachelor Degree or 2:1 and Masters with Distinction

Subject area: Applied Mathematics, Computer Science & IT

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