10/12/2010
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Two University of Illinois computer science professors are participating with Sandia National Labs in a new effort as part of the the DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing challenge to create a new exascale computing architecture. Professor Marc Snir, the Faiman-Muroga Professor of Computer Science and professor Bill Gropp, the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science, will be teaming with Sandia Labs to prototype a new extreme scale hardware and software system called X-caliber.
DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program seeks "to create an innovative, revolutionary new generation of computing systems that overcomes the limitations of current evolutionary approach," the agency said in a statement.
The Sandia Labs team will be addressing issues in high-performance computer architecture, algorithms development, supercomputing, system software, programming methods, applications, microelectronics in 3-D packaging and silicon photonics. As part of the UHPC effort, Snir and Gropp will be creating new programming models and methods for application performance modeling for the new X-caliber system.
“Today’s computational paradigm is approaching hard energy and power limits,” said the project’s principal investigator Richard Murphy of Sandia Labs. “UHPC is the only program intended to solve the problem by fundamentally enabling a new model of computation that will not only be more energy efficient, but will improve system scalability, resilience, programmability, and security. This is a chance for Sandia to help revolutionize the entire field of computing, and we are honored to lead a team of powerful industry partners and distinguished researchers in academia to address these challenges.”