Department of Computer Systems

Info

The Department of Computer Systems is responsible for teaching mainly hardware-oriented courses in all study programs accredited at FIT (i.e. in the Bc, MSc, and PhD study programmes). 

In the new Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence follow-up Master study program, the Department guarantees the following specializations:

The lectures in most of the courses are supplemented with projects or laboratory sessions, where students acquire hands-on experience and skills with the latest software packages and hardware platforms (multiprocessor systems, embedded systems, design systems for FPGA, supercomputing, etc.). The following labs are operated at UPSY: 

  • Reconfigurable hardware laboratory 
  • Applied micro-controllers laboratory 
  • Printed circuit board laboratory

Scientific and research activities of the Department are focused on HW/SW architecture of computer systems at the levels of digital circuits, single- and many-core processors (including GPUs), embedded systems, application-specific integrated circuits, reconfigurable systems based on FPGAs, computer clusters and supercomputers. Other research is performed in the areas of fault- tolerant systems design, diagnostics, testing and reliability of digital systems, circuit design methods for low power, approximate computing, bio-inspired artificial intelligence for design, adaptation and the self healing of digital systems, and brain signal processing methods (EEG, fMRI).

The most important application areas include:

  • accelerated computer technologies for high-speed networks
  • supercomputers in high performance demanding simulations
  • acceleration of bioinformatics tasks
  • acceleration and optimization in solving of road traffic tasks
  • adaptive hardware in FPGAs
  • bio-inspired circuit design methods
  • fault tolerant system design
  • embedded and RT systems
  • unconventional computer architecture
  • neural engineering and medical applications

Members of the Department have been involved in many international (e.g.,  PAMMOTH, CITRUS) and national research projects (including the National supercomputing center - IT4Innovations), collaborate with Czech and foreign universities, industrial partners, and other institutions, for example, with Cesnet - in the area of research and development of hardware accelerated network technologies. They have contributed to establishing new IT companies, for example, Camea, INVEA-TECH (now FlowMon Networks and Netcope Technologies), RehiveTech, and BrnoLogic.

Members of the Department have contributed to the project, which led to developing unique hardware acceleration cards with network throughput 400 Gb/s. The collaboration of FIT and RehiveTech was awarded with the Cooperation of the Year prize organized by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic in 2014. In the international competitions - Humies, annually organized at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computing (GECCO), the members of the Department were awarded with: 1 Gold medal (2015), 3 Silver medals (2008, 2011, 2016) and 2 Bronze (2014, 2018) medals. In 2017, prof. Sekanina's team was awarded with the Czech Science Foundation President Award for excellent results of the Advanced Methods for Evolutionary Design of Complex Digital Circuits project. In 2018, dr. Kořenek's team was warded with the Minister of the Interior award for outstanding results in the area of security research. Dr. Vojtěch Mrázek was awarded The Czech Head prize in 2019. For other awards, see this link.

Active research groups:

Chronology of the Heads of the Department:

  • prof. Ing. Václav Dvořák, DrSc. (2002 - 2005)
  • doc. Ing. Zdeněk Kotásek, CSc. (2005 - 2016)
  • prof. Ing. Lukáš Sekanina, Ph.D. (2016 - )

Seminar of the Department of Computer Systems is organized every Friday in room L314 at 1 PM. See program.

Contact information

Department of Computer Systems
Božetěchova 2
612 00 Brno

+420 54114-1166
upsy@fit.vut.cz

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