Xilinx Teams with Leading Universities Around the World to Establish Adaptive Compute Research Clusters - Seite 2

The cluster at ETH Zurich will be led by Prof. Gustavo Alonso, head of the Institute for Computing Platforms and a member of the Systems Group in the Department of Computer Science, and will focus on network and database acceleration.

“The clusters that Xilinx has made available to researchers offers a unique opportunity to explore the latest technology at an unprecedented scale and ease of use,” said Prof. Alonso. “The clusters will enable new research as well as help establish a much-needed infrastructure for sharing designs, results, tools, and ideas in a reproducible manner.”

The cluster at UCLA will focus on energy-efficient computing, customized computing for big-data applications and highly scalable algorithms. Prof. Jason Cong, Director for the Center for Customizable Domain-Specific Computing at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, will lead the effort. Prof. Cong has been at the forefront of FPGA technology research for more than 30 years.

“We very much appreciate the contribution of the Xilinx Adaptive Compute Cluster,” said Prof. Cong. “It will greatly facilitate our research programs on graph-based machine learning, video analytics, genomics and precision medicine. The offering of high-bandwidth memory (HBM)-based FPGAs in this cluster is especially timely and helpful as many computation steps in those research projects are memory-bound.”

The cluster at UIUC will be based in the Illinois’ Coordinated Science Lab and will build on many years of research and education work in high performance and heterogeneous computing at UIUC. Specific topics include novel multi-FPGA topologies connected through high-speed links and switches, security and memory coherence for a network of FPGAs, efficient peer-to-peer data transfers, FPGA accelerators for processing SSD data, and compilers and system tools targeting high performance, high programmability and portability.

The center will be led by Prof. Deming Chen, Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering, and Prof. Wen-Mei Hwu, AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), both with the ECE Department.

“The center funding together with the hardware donation will enable us to carry out new research and educational activities that were not possible before,” said Prof. Chen at UIUC. “We will build novel, experimental FPGA-centric compute systems and develop domain-specific compilers and system tools targeting high-performance computing. We will focus on several important application domains, including AI with deep learning, large-scale graph processing, and computational genomics. Several undergraduate and graduate-level courses will benefit from the research activities and access to the cluster. We also plan to engage several other universities to exchange experience, share computation resources and pursue collaborative projects.”