Defense Department Awards $146 Million for Supercomputing Research IBM Partners with UIUC Department of Computer Science Researchers

IBM is partnering with researchers from the UIUC Department of Computer Science on $53.3 million DARPA grant to develop the next generation of supercomputers. The UIUC team has a major role in the architecture definition, compilation support, innovative middleware, programming environments, and the definition of a productivity evaluation framework and metrics.

URBANA, IL (PRWEB) July 17, 2003 -- IBM is partnering with researchers from the UIUC Department of Computer Science on $53.3 million DARPA grant to develop the next generation of supercomputers. The UIUC team has a major role in the architecture definition, compilation support, innovative middleware, programming environments, and the definition of a productivity evaluation framework and metrics.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently selected IBM, Cray Inc., and Sun Microsystems for the second phase of the High Productivity Computer Systems program. The goal of the program is to provide a new generation of supercomputers for national security and industrial user communities by the end of the decade.

The IBM team, which was awarded $53.3 million, includes IBM researchers and developers, plus a consortium of 12 leading universities and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The University of Illinois is represented by Department of Computer Science researchers Josep Torrellas, Ralph Johnson, David Padua, and Marc Snir.

The IBM proposal, PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing Systems), follows a vision of a highly-adaptable system that configures hardware and software components to match application demands. A major emphasis of the machine proposal is ease of use, as supported by its architecture, compiler, operating system, and language support.

The UIUC team was involved in the year-long phase one when they helped conceive the architecture and software systems of the machine. In the three-year phase two, the UIUC team has a major role in the architecture definition, compilation support, innovative middleware, programming environments, and the definition of a productivity evaluation framework and metrics," said Josep Torrellas, the principal investigator of the team.

Ultimately, IBM aims at producing a system that automatically analyzes the workload and dynamically responds to the changes in application demands by configuring its components to match application needs.

IBM has a proven track record of innovating with a sense of business reality and pushing out these innovations in commercially-viable products. This program matches our philosophy of accelerating the flow of innovation out of the labs into the marketplace," said Nick Donofrio, IBM senior vice president, corporate technology and manufacturing.

At the end of phase two, a new competition will open the path to a 48-month, full-scale engineering development effort. By 2010, a new level of high performance computing technology will be attained with the next level of performance developing in the research labs.

7/15/03

Kathleen Zanotti, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(217) 333-4049, kzanotti@cs.uiuc.edu