Illinois Impact
Parallel computing is in our blood.
The University of Illinois has been a leading institution in parallel computing research for more than four decades. Illinois innovation in parallel computing began with generations of the ILLIAC, the CEDAR machine, and the Illinois Cache Coherence Protocol and helped define the landscape of multiprocessors.
- The Parafrase, Polaris, and IMPACT systems pioneered autoparallelization and have enabled successful commercial parallelizing compilers.
- MPI continues to be the most popular programming paradigm for clusters.
- The Charm++ automated resource management parallel programming system is used by several highly scalable parallel applications.
- Actors, a paradigm of concurrent computation with rigorously defined formal semantics, has been realized in a number of novel parallel programming languages such as Erlang, E, Ptolemy, Thal, Scala and SALSA.
- Thread Level Speculation enhances programmability. Thread Level Speculation is now being provided in some multiprocessors.
- The Java and C++ memory models provide
Today, Illinois is poised to install the largest academic supercomputer and start a center for petascale computing. Through UPCRC, Illinois will help usher in a new era of parallel computing for consumer systems with coordinated and multi-disciplinary research that draws upon Illinois leadership in parallelism.
Impact of Illinois on Parallel Computing Advances
(data in boxes from http://www.upcrc.illinois.edu/about-impact.html)