A research team that includes UT Electrical and Engineering Professor Mattan Erez, and is led by NVIDIA, was awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm.
The purpose of the four-year research contract is to address what the agency calls a “crisis in computing.” The team, which also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six top U.S. universities, is being funded by DARPA to address the challenge that conventional computing architectures are reaching the practical limits of energy usage and will not meet the challenges of exascale computing. The research team plans to develop new software and hardware technology to dramatically increase computing performance, programmability and reliability.
The team will investigate "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing," and the project covers all system aspects including, circuits, architecture, interconnection networks, system design, runtime and operating systems, compilers, programming languages, and applications. The goal is to get 1 PetaFLOP of performance in a single rack.
Dr. Erez joined the Cockrell School of Engineering in 2007 and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His research focuses on computer architecture and embedded processors, computer engineering and software engineering.
