Jacob Part of Research Team Awarded DARPA UHPC Grant

Prof. Bruce Jacob

Professor Bruce Jacob was part of a team selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new supercomputer prototype systems for DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program.

The 4-year, $25.8M award will fund research at the University of Maryland, as well as academic project partners at Louisiana State University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Notre Dame, University of Southern California, Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University and North Carolina State University. Sandia Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, is leading a team of industry partners on the project, including Micron Technology, Inc. and LexisNexis Special Services, Inc.

The goal of the UHPC program is to overcome current limiting factors, such as power consumption and architectural and programming complexity, by developing entirely new computer architectures and programming models. The program's aim is to produce a more energy-efficient computer that delivers 100 to 1,000 times more performance and is easier to program than current systems.

Other research proposals selected to develop UHPC prototypes came from Intel Corp., NVIDIA Corp. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Published August 22, 2010