Multicore Computational Center
Multicore Computational Center
It gives me great pleasure to share with you this first MC2 Director's Blog' feature that will appear on a regular quarterly basis under the news/events section of our Multicore Computational Center's website at www.mc2.umbc.edu. While our website is still undergoing revisions as we are making revisions to how we wish our site to appear, we will continue to update it with general MC2 related news events as they occur, this feature will attempt to report from the Director's perspective not only the status and highlights of various projects, initiatives and other related activities undertaken at the MC2 but where and when possible some of my own views of how the general multicore technology field is shaping up. This news/events section will also carry articles of interest occurring more widely that I may choose to comment on. We will email a short summary of the articles appearing on the website for readers to download the full articles more broadly to the UMBC community, our industry and academic partners and other colleagues with potential interest in following multicore technology. I also hope the readers of this website will share with me their own comments and reactions to this blog that I may use from time to time to share with the general audience.
As I sit here composing this first blog on Thanksgiving day, I can't help looking back with pride at how fast our MC2 has gotten off the ground since being officially informed on July 9 that the UMBC proposal to establish a Multicore Computational Center was selected by IBM as their first sole center award. Within two weeks, four of the most promising computer science graduate students were offered and accepted research assistantships with our embryonic center. More significant, Dr. John Dorband, one of the three nationally recognized scientists for founding the Beowulf cluster system (i.e. named after the same hero featured in the original book and movie) accepted a position as Chief Computational Scientist of MC2 as well as an Associate Research Professorship in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. How extremely fortunate we are to have land one of our nations leading experts in cluster computing. Already, this spring John will be offering a Seminar course in multicore parallel computing along with my Associate Director, Prof. Yelena Yesha. Since then, our MC2 staff has expanded to involve ten graduate and undergraduate students with eight part time faculty staff serving as student project supervisors.
Shortly after receiving the award, a dedication ceremony for MC2 was held on September 21, with a turn out of more than 140 guests, mostly external from Industry, Government and Academia, that exceeding our highest expectations. The key speakers at the ceremony were the IBM V.P. for Product Engineering, Rod Adkins and Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, UMBC President. Attending were leaders from NASA, NOAA, NSF, and such industries as GE, Ciena, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Computer Science Corp., University of Maryland Medical Systems, UMCP, JHU, GMU etc.
I had the privilege of also speaking at the ceremony where I described the vision we had for the MC2 as well as some of the projects that we proposed to apply the IBM Multicore Cell blade system. A list of projects, their descriptions and status can be seen under our research section at the MC2 website http://mc2.umbc.edu. In addition, Prof. Yesha and I were asked to give an overview of the MC2 at the IBM University Day held in Research Triangle Park, NC. Accompanying us were some MC2 staff faculty and a MC2 undergraduate student who presented a poster. This visit also provided us the opportunity to meet with the IBM Program Manager, Hina Shah , to discuss our accomplishments to date and plans for future work and collaborations.
This quarter Prof. Yesha and I have been quite active in conducting workshops, speaking engagements and generally acting as evangelists for the Cell technology. Prof. Yesha organized a Cell Tools and Application workshop at the IBM CASCON conference with more than a thousand attendees. Several of our staff and colleagues gave talks at the workshop as did I and we will provide links to the CASCON presentations as soon as they are posted under the MC2 website links. Our CASCON multicore workshop was one of the most popular attended session with standing room only in a large meeting room with user responses rating the session extremely high.
In addition, MC2 held a Cell programming training workshop for 25 participants consisting of industry partners, staff and representatives from the UMBC Math and Physics departments. In support of this workshop, not only was the Cell simulator available but IBM made two Cell blades available as loaners. However, as of this date, we are still awaiting delivery of the switches, cables and power supplies purchased from IBM that were needed to install the twelve cell blades awarded under the SUR grant in our IBM blade cluster.
Our single setback this quarter was a planning grant submitted in collaboration with Georgia Tech, UCSD, and U/Minn to NSF that was asked to obtain more supporting documentation to meet their guidelines. As a result, we were asked to reapply at the next opportunity in March. However, the exercise was well worth the effort having made some very interesting contacts with industry and government agencies which we hopefully expect will result in joint sponsored research grants in the coming year with the MC2. We intend to reapply in the Spring of 2008 with our partners.
In conclusion, not only has the organizational aspects of starting the center gone extremely well but we will be reporting on the substantial research progress in our next blog that will also appear on our website.
Sincerely,
Milt Halem, Director