In 2017 the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science was selected to establish a five-year, $29.7 million national center to remove a bottleneck built into computer systems 70 years ago.
Directed by Kevin Skadron, Harry Douglas Forsyth Professor of Computer Science, the Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory, or CRISP, recently held its final annual review reporting on its groundbreaking research.
The work of the eight-university national center focused on removing the “memory wall” in computer architectures, which prevents computing systems from accessing data in memory as fast as today’s processors are capable of analyzing the data. In short, CRISP researchers laid the foundation to revolutionize scientists’ ability to find solutions to some of society’s most difficult challenges hidden in massive datasets – like cures for cancer or the containment of viral outbreaks.
Now Skadron is a member of a new research consortium with a mandate similar to CRISP’s, called the Center for Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory, or PRISM.
PRISM is led by Tajana Simunic-Rosing, a computer science professor at the University of California San Diego, who also was a key contributor on the CRISP team. In addition to UVA, other PRISM members include Stanford University, Georgia Tech, the University of Wisconsin Madison, Penn State University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Los Angeles, Berkeley and Irvine.
Like CRISP before it, PRISM is one of several centers created around research themes of priority for the semiconductor industry and funded under programs managed by North Carolina-based Semiconductor Research Corporation. The Joint University Microelectronics Program, or JUMP, and the newly launched JUMP 2.0, are public-private partnerships “aimed at accelerating U.S. advances in information and communications technologies,” according to a Semiconductor Research Corporation news release.
In addition to membership in PRISM, UVA is also receiving funding to support collaboration with another JUMP 2.0 center called ACE: Evolvable Computing for Next-Generation Distributed Computer Systems.
“These large, center-scale programs profoundly enhance the nation’s ability to maintain technological leadership while simultaneously training a large cohort of students who will help address the nation’s rapidly growing need for technology leadership,” Skadron said when CRISP’s five-year grant began.
His view hasn’t changed.
“I am immensely proud of what CRISP accomplished and of UVA’s leadership in this critical area. We made huge strides in developing new hardware designs and programming infrastructure to tackle the ‘memory wall’ and accelerate key applications such as bioinformatics, data analytics and video processing. Collectively, CRISP members produced numerous high-profile publications and numerous patents in progress, and two spinoff companies,” Skadron said.
“Now I am honored to be on the PRISM team. Data volumes continue to grow exponentially, and the memory wall remains a major bottleneck that we need to continue to work on to solve some of the most important societal challenges, such as precision medicine that will allow much more individualized therapies to treat and even prevent disease more effectively and with fewer side effects.”