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UPCRC Illinois Research
As UPCRC Illinois enters its second year, our vision of parallel computing research continues to evolve and mature. We have recently restructured our projects to reflect this evolution. Our initial research agenda, published in November 2008, highlighted three main themes:
- Focus on Disciplined Parallel Programming
- Multi-Front Attack on Multicore Programming
- Human-Centric Vision of Future Consumer Applications
These themes remain relevant as we continue to see human-computer interaction and computer-environment interaction as the most promising domains for compute intensive applications. We also see three main thrusts currently driving our research:
- Creating opportunity for multicore exploitation: Developing new client applications that require high performance and can leverage high levels of parallelism. Identifying application domains that can motivate high client performance, and developing application prototypes and libraries in relevant domains. Using our experience in those domains to guide our work on system software and hardware.
- Creating software to exploit opportunity: Developing software technologies that facilitate the exploitation of multicore parallelism for those applications — languages, tools, environments, and processes that enable the vast number of client application programmers to develop good parallel code.
- Creating hardware to exploit opportunity: Developing hardware technologies that facilitate the continued scaling of multicore systems to the hundreds and thousands of cores — thus facilitating the best use of silicon a decade from now.
UPCRC Illinois is a joint research effort of the Illinois department of computer science and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, with funding from corporate partners Microsoft and Intel. Its work is conducted by faculty members and graduate students from the departments of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois.