Faculty
collaborate on supercomputer
By Steve
Carr
UNM Computing
faculty David A. Bader, Patrick Bridges, Arthur B. Maccabe and
Bernard Moret, are collaborating on IBMs Productive, Easy-to-use,
Reliable, Computing Systems (PERCS) project, a new initiative
to design a supercomputer several orders of magnitude faster
than todays high-end systems.
IBM has
received more than $53 million in funding from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the second phase of DARPAs
High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative to perform
this research and development effort in technology risk reduction
demonstrations and a preliminary design review.
The IBM
PERCS project will conduct ground-breaking research in areas
that include revolutionary chip technology, new computer architecture,
operating systems, compiler and programming environments. PERCS
is based on an integrated software-hardware co-design that will
enable multi-petaflop sustained performance by 2010. A petaflop
is one quadrillion calculations per second.
PERCS aims
at reducing the time-to-solution, starting from the inception
to actual result. To this end, PERCS will include innovative
middleware, compiler and programming environments that will
be supported by hardware features to automate many phases of
the program development process.
High-performance
computing is a strategic area of excellence at the University
of New Mexico, and this project represents UNMs continued
research leadership in advanced computing studies, said
Bader, principal investigator for UNMs portion of the
project.
Maccabe,
associate director of UNMs Center for High Performance
Computing, noted that, It is rare for universities to
be involved this early in the development of a new computing
system.