Proposal for the Center for Parallelism at Utah (CPU) Presented by Ganesh Gopalakrishnan and Mary Hall Full list of proposed researchers in the center Rajeev Balasubramonian, Martin Berzins, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Mary Hall, Robert M. Kirby, Matthew Might, John Regehr School of Computing CAMPUS 1

Computing is at crossroads – In the 1990s, computers used to double in speed – The same software ran twice as fast every two years Achieved by increasing the clock speed Achieved by advances in compiler technology – Bill Joy’s statement: “If you have a compute job that takes 8 years to run, you are better off waiting 7 years doing nothing and then starting with the latest hardware available then – still finishing earlier!” – This is called the FREE LUNCH Motivations for CPU

The Free Lunch is over! Clock frequencies cannot be increased (without melting the chips) Compilers cease to find enough “hidden parallelism” in user code Motivations for CPU

What must Computer Researchers do? – Use Parallelism at an unprecedented scale! Motivations for CPU (Diagram for illustration only; multi-core image is courtesy of Sun, and supercomputer image is courtesy of IBM)

What must Computer Researchers do? – Use Parallelism at an unprecedented scale! – For programming Supercomputers Desktop / Server machines Embedded Systems – Unfortunately, slapping together CPUs is insufficient – NEED TO DISCOVER WAYS TO EXPLOIT CONCURRENCY EFFICIENTLY AND CORRECTLY! – NEED TO TEACH PARALLEL PROGRAMMING AT AN UNPRECEDENTED SCALE Motivations for CPU

6 IBM Blue Gene (Picture Courtesy IBM) LANL’s Petascale machine “Roadrunner” (AMD Opteron CPUs and IBM PowerX Cell) U.S. Competitiveness Depends on Continued Leadership in High Performance Computing (Image courtesy of Steve Parker, U of Utah) (Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Software Errors Cost U.S. Economy $59.5 Billion Annually NIST Assesses Technical Needs of Industry to Improve Software-Testing (NIST , June 28, 2002) In year 2000, total sales of software reached approx $180B These best estimates are a decade old WITH PARALLELISM, WITHOUT INTENSE RESEARCH, THESE FIGURES WILL BE FAR EXCEEDED NATION’S COMPETITIVENESS WILL BE SEVERELY JEOPARDIZED! Dollar costs of software bugs

8 IBM Blue Gene (Picture Courtesy IBM) LANL’s Petascale machine “Roadrunner” (AMD Opteron CPUs and IBM PowerX Cell) U.S. Competitiveness Depends on Continued Leadership in High Performance Computing These machines cost $1M of electricity a year to operate! This is just for one Peta-flop (10  floating point operations a second) One Exaflop is being targeted to be attained by 2018 (10  floating point ops / s) We don’t want to burn $1B of electricity a year! GOAL : Attain one ExaOp in roughly the power it takes to do one PetaOp now ! We need a 1000 x increase in efficiency ! ONLY PATH AHEAD : Use of parallelism !

Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) at Berkeley and Illinois Proposal selected by technical committee from Intel and Microsoft The Five-year, $10M Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory at Stanford Founding Members : Sun and Nvidia Affiliated Members : AMD, IBM, INTEL, HP, NEC Centers at Georgia Tech, Rice WORLDWIDE GROWTH OF INTEREST IN PARALLELISM!

Quote from a recent Communications of the ACM: “Industry needs help from the research community to succeed in its recent dramatic shift to parallel computing. Failure could jeopardize both the IT industry and the portions of the economy that depend on rapidly improving information technology.” This article is co-authored by several members of the Berkeley faculty, including David Patterson, past president of the ACM. Motivations for CPU

With recent hires, the School of Computing has attained critical mass in many areas of parallel computing – Recent hires include Mary Hall and Matthew Might – Gopalakrishnan’s research has intensified in this area – WE ARE EXTREMELY WELL POSITIONED TO BE ON THE WORLD PARALLEL COMPUTING MAP, ATTRACTING STUDENTS, INDUSTRIAL SPONSORS, AND APPLY JOINTLY FOR LARGE GRANTS – ONE FOCUS INSTEAD OF DIFFUSED FOCUS ON PIs’ research We are also an Nvidia Center of Excellence Our CPU center will definitely include other members of the School of Computing, going into the future Why our center CPU, and why now?

Microsoft HPC Center from 2005 to 2008 with Kirby Active collaborations with – Intel (Austin labs, Santa Clara, Oregon) – IBM (Yorktown Heights, Austin labs, Eclipse group at Kentucky) – Microsoft (several groups, including joint curriculum development) – NEC Research (NJ; successful student internships) – Argonne (internships, joint tool development, best paper) – Freescale (through Multi-core Association) – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (Student internships) – Polycore Inc. (through Multi-core association) – Sun’s recent gift of multi-core machine worth about $10k Joint research by undergraduates especially mentioned – Outstanding CRA undergraduate finalist in 2007 – Undergraduates releasing software and co-authoring paper with IBM Gopalakrishnan’s recent work

Mary Hall’s recent work

Concrete Plans of Action Joint Web Presence Enroll Additional Colleagues Form Industrial Board and Invite Industries Joint Student Recruiting Active Seeking of External Funds on Unified Basis – NSF Center Grants – DARPA, DOE, … grants Organize Industrial Summer Courses Research Experience for Undergraduates New classes and a joint seminar series