2/7/2011
Wen-Mei W. Hwu, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, will participate in a three-year, $2.6 million grant from the Department of Energy as part of a team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Oregon, and Georgia Tech to design a Next-Generation Software Infrastructure for Productive Heterogeneous Exascale Computing.
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Wen-Mei W. Hwu, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, will participate in a three-year, $2.6 million grant from the Department of Energy as part of a team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Oregon, and Georgia Tech to design a Next-Generation Software Infrastructure for Productive Heterogeneous Exascale Computing.
Exascale computing will be faster and more energy efficient than petascale computing and may give the U.S. scientific community a global competitive advantage. “Vancouver” will involve porting applications such as simulations of new energy sources and more efficient engines for aircraft and vehicles from petascale to exascale platforms. The goal is to reduce the computation time from as much as six months to a year down to a few days.
A good part of the improvement will come from new computing devices, such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Hwu, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a researcher in the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at Illinois, is a leading expert in designing and programming these devices. He recently led a joint Illinois-NVIDIA project for constructing and programming the EcoG GPU cluster computer that took the number 3 spot on the November Green500 List. EcoG is one of the three most energy efficient supercomputers in the world today.
“If we are really successful, it will be a lot easier for scientists and engineers to port their applications to GPU-based systems, which can raise application performance by 20 times or more,” Hwu said. “Using these tools, scientists and engineers can instantly increase processing speed and reduce power consumption using the GPU hardware, without long programming delays.”
However, programming GPUs is currently difficult and time consuming, which has been a major stumbling block. Hwu and Illinois faculty have been working to address the human side of the problem through courses and summer programs, which have drawn programmers from around the world. Hwu’s participation in Vancouver will focus on new programming tools that will greatly reduce the difficulty in programming GPUs and other types of parallel processors.
Hwu is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters system, is co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and PI for the world's first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence. At CSL,he is the director of the OpenIMPACT project, which has delivered new compiler and computer architecture technologies to the computer industry since 1987. He also serves as the Soft Systems Theme leader of the MARCO/DARPA Gigascale Silicon Research Center (GSRC) and on the Executive Committees of both the GSRC and the MARCO/DARPA Center for Circuit and System Solutions (C2S2).
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Contact: Wen-Mei W. Hwu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineeirng, 217/244-8270.
Writer: Tom Moone, communications coordinator, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 217/244-9893.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.