In the sixteenth episode of the "All Day Research" Podcast, we welcome Prof. Dr. Marco Platzner, who talks about his research field Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) together with our host Lukas Ostermann.
Prof. Dr. Platzner is Head of Computer Engineering at Paderborn University, where he conducts research on design methods for FPGAs. These devices came onto the market around the mid-1980s and were originally intended for electronics implementation. In the meantime, however, this has changed: "The fact that you can change the hardware - and do so quite quickly - led to the discovery a few years later that you can also use these devices for computing. Today, FPGAs are relatively widespread and are used for high-performance computing and data science, among other things," explains Prof. Dr. Platzner.
One of the goals of his current research is to achieve more energy-efficient work with FPGAs. Unfortunately, relatively little is known in this area, according to Prof. Dr. Platzner. "In January, we will start a new project in which we want to characterize exactly this aspect together with other partners. We want to use it to determine which parts of this neural network actually need all the energy in the data centre." This is a major challenge, however, because FPGAs contain several million functional blocks and measuring them is very complex, explains Prof. Dr. Platzner.
The podcast was created in collaboration with the Department for Computer Science and the Computer Science Student Council. The aim is to give more insights into science and thereby bring students - especially those in the first semester - closer to the study, to arouse interest and to show how much fun research and the study of computer science at the University of Paderborn can be.
Listen now to the sixteenth episode of the "All Day Research" podcast. Find it everywhere podcast is available or here on the department page.
Missed the last episodes? Don't worry, all episodes can also be found on the department page.
