UPCRC Illinois is one of two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers launched in 2008 by

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

and

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 serie ...

"Microsoft and Intel Launch Parallel Computing Research Centers to Accelerate Benefits to Consumers, Businesses "
(March 18, 2008). to accelerate the development of mainstream

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different f ...

for consumer and business applications such as desktop and mobile computing. UPCRC Illinois is a joint research effort of the Department of Computer Science and the

Coordinated Science Laboratory The Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) is a major scientific research laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With deep roots in information technology, CSL has invented and deployed many landmark innovations, such as the el ...

at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...

. Research is conducted by faculty members and graduate students from the departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. UPCRC Illinois research faculty are led by Co-Directors Marc Snir and Wen-mei Hwu.

Research

The UPCRC Illinois whitepaper
Parallel Computing Research at Illinois: The UPCRC Agenda
expands in great detail about three primary research themes: *''Focus on Disciplined Parallel Programming''—Sequential languages have evolved to support well-structured programming, and provide safety and modularity. Mechanisms for parallel control, synchronization, and communication have not yet undergone a similar evolution. The UPCRC Illinois takes the optimistic view that parallelism can be tamed for all to use by providing disciplined parallel programming models, supported by sophisticated development and execution environments. *''Multi-Front Attack on Multicore Programming''—UPCRC Illinois is taking an integrated broad-based attack on parallelism at all levels of the system stack from applications down to hardware, using every weapon in the arsenal to enable performance, scalability, and programmability. This includes investigating disciplined parallel languages,

metaprogramming Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself ...

and autotuners, and domain-specific environments; developing a powerful translation environment to exploit information from multiple sources at different times in the life of a program; developing an adaptive runtime to handle heterogeneity and automate resource management; developing new hardware mechanisms to enhance performance, scalability and programmability; and rethinking the customary division of labor among the layers of the system stack. Refactoring tools will help move existing code to new environments and formal methods-based techniques and tools will help ensure correctness. *''Human-Centric Vision of Future Consumer Applications''—Driving the agenda is a human-centric vision of future consumer applications, backed up by research on application technologies to enable quantum-leaps in immersive visual realism, reliable

natural-language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

, and robust

telepresence Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance or effect of being present via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location. Telepresence requires that the use ...

. Investigating these applications reveals new parallel patterns and serves as a testbed for evaluating, refining, and ultimately proving UPCRC Illinois ideas on

multicore A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...

programming.

Parallel computing history at Illinois

The university's history of parallel computing stretches back more than 40 years. From the first academic parallel

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructio ...

, the ILLIAC IV started in 1964, to today's work to install the first petascale computer,

Blue Waters Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which auth ...

, Illinois has defined the landscape of parallel computing. Contributions from past and current Illinois faculty include: *

ILLIAC ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974. Some more modern ...

CEDAR Cedar may refer to: Trees and plants *''Cedrus'', common English name cedar, an Old-World genus of coniferous trees in the plant family Pinaceae *Cedar (plant), a list of trees and plants known as cedar Places United States * Cedar, Arizona * ...

* Illinois Cache Coherence (MESI) Protocol *

OpenMP OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared-memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on many platforms, instruction-set architectures and operating syst ...

MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...

* Path Pascal *

Actors An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is (), lite ...

* Java and C++ memory models * Compilers and auto-parallelization techniques – Analyzer, Polaris, Parafrase, IMPACT,

LLVM LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a front end for any programming language and a back end for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate repre ...

* Race detection techniques * Parallel

runtime system In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile t ...

s – Chare Kernel, Charm++ * IBM/

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the A ...

PERCS – a precursor to IBM's Power 7 * AVIO to detect atomicity violations * Parallel programming

patterns A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated li ...

References

External links

UPCRC Illinois website

Parallel@Illinois website

Coordinated Science Laboratory website
{{coord missing, Illinois Computer science institutes in the United States Parallel computing University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Research institutes in Illinois