IBM and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia create the CEPBA-IBM Research InstituteBarcelona 16 December 2000 On October 26th, IBM Corporation and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) signed an agreement for creating the CEPBA-IBM Research Institute (CIRI). Its main objectives are research, development of applications and advanced technology transfer to industry. This centre will specialise in computer architecture and supercomputing. CIRI has an IBM SP Power3 supercomputer with 64 375 MHz processors, which will be upgraded to 128 processors on March.
IBM will provide a contribution of nearly $16M in 4 years for high performance hardware, software, and 30 grants. IBM will also provide two senior technicians who will be CIRI's deputy directors jointly with CEPBA's director. UPC's contribution will be the building, located in its Barcelona campus, which will host this center.
"At present, CEPBA already has projects with IBM, and CIRI will be a point of contact between this company and any research group interested in collaborating with IBM", said Mateo Valero, Full Professor at the UPC and CIRI's director. This research center will directly collaborate too with IBM research laboratories, especially, with the T. J. Watson Research Center.
"Present projects CEPBA is working in are tools, languages and methods for programming in parallel supercomputers; data bases, its optimization, efficient parallel sorting algorithms for DB2; and some projects in computer architecture, such as binary translation", said Valero. But CIRI will start new research areas, such as "data bases, their internal structure as well as deep computing; Internet servers, multiprocessor systems where searches have particular features; and bioinformatics", said CIRI's director. In fact, deep computing technology, computer architecture and business intelligence technology will be CIRI's main research fields.
As Mateo Valero said, "the basic unit of collaboration will be a research project; for example, in the protein folding field, IBM has run the Blue Gene project, a supercomputer able to achieve this great challenge; so that, the protein folding will be a preferential research area for us, and both Madrid and Catalonia have very important scientific groups to establish collaborations with".
"This is the first time that IBM Corporation makes such a donation and establishes this kind of collaboration in Europe", said CIRI's director. "This agreement has been possible thanks to prof. Jesús Labarta and his research group, who have been working in parallel computing and supercomputing for 15 years and being a leading group in these fields". Precisely, CEPBA's research in computer architecture was awarded with the best technical paper award of the Supercomputing 2000 Conference, hosted in Dallas on November.
Teresa Via |
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