OpenSPARC Center of Excellence Receives New Funding

4/28/2009

OpenSPARC is a collaboration between UIUC dpts computer science and electrical and computer engineering and Sun

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The University of Illinois OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, lead by Prof. Josep Torrellas, and funded by Sun Microsystems, Inc. received an additional grant from Sun Microsystems in support of its continuing research mission for the year 2009-2010. The Center represents a collaboration between the University of Illinois departments of computer science and electrical and computer engineering and Sun in support of OpenSPARC, a global community that fosters the creation of tools and derivative chip designs based on Sun's highly multithreaded UltraSPARC processor family.

As part of the Center of Excellence, Illinois researchers will be advancing the OpenSPARC movement through research in several areas: support for reliable processor hardware, compilation for large numbers of threads, transactional memory, and hardware security.

The OpenSPARC Center of Excellence at Illinois harnesses the efforts of a research team with a high level of experience in a variety of complementary areas. Illinois computer science faculty members Josep Torrellas, Sarita Adve, Vikram Adve, Maria Garzaran, Sam King, David Padua, YY Zhou, and Craig Zilles, will be advancing the efforts of the center along with Prof. Deming Chen from the department of electrical and computer engineering.

The OpenSPARC movement aims to increase participation in SPARC processor architecture development and application design by making hardware intellectual property freely available. The hope is that, by leveraging the open source community, developers will be able to rapidly create new and more tightly integrated thread-rich applications at a markedly lower cost.

Research conducted at this center is critical to the success of this effort, as it addresses the primary challenges to widespread adoption of highly parallel multiprocessor architectures like those represented by OpenSPARC.


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This story was published April 28, 2009.