High-performance computing (HPC) has come to the forefront as a dominant field of technology for the advancement of science and commerce. The Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for High Performance Reconfigurable Computing at George Washington University will investigate, develop, and evaluate new concepts, methods, infrastructure, and tools in reconfigurable HPC, from building-block devices to infrastructure to applications, and advance these technologies through research and education for the benefit of Center members, students, and the discipline at large.
CHREC began operations in January 2007, and since then, has established itself as among the fastest growing and most successful Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRCs) sponsored by the NSF. Intellectual Merit: During Phase-I of CHREC, a range of problems aimed at improving the productivity of High-Performance Heterogeneous Computers, with emphasis on Reconfigurable Computing, has been investigated. Heterogeneous and reconfigurable computing were demonstrated to provide orders of magnitude in speed as compared with conventional computers, in many critical applications. Examples are security/cryptography, remote sensing, and bioinformatics. Heterogeneous and reconfigurable high-performance computers are, however, difficult to use. This is why our work under the CHREC center has focused on productivity, where we have emphasized performance, power and programmability at the same time. Some of this work includes virtualization of FPGA and GPU systems published in ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Tech. & Systems, (El-Araby et al., Jan 2009) and presented in the International Conference on Parallel Processing (Li et al., ICPP 2011); Efficient scheduling of tasks with multiple architectural variants, published in IEEE Transactions on Computers (Huang et al., Sept 2012) and ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (Huang et al., Nov 2010); Efficient scheduling of tasks for GPU accelerated systems (Li et al., Computer, Nov 2013); Evaluating high-level design methodologies for high-performance reconfigurable systems (El-Araby et al., IEEE Trans. Parallel and DIstributed Syst., Jan 2011); Mapping and optimizations of the UPC language on the 64 core TILERA processor (Serres et al, HIPS/IPDPS workshop, May 2011); etc. Broader Impact: The GWU CHREC site has graduated 4 doctoral students directly involved in CHREC projects, and 2 more doctoral students affiliated with the center. Three of them are faculty members, and the others have joined the industry. In addition, six postdocs received training, who have progressed to successful careers in industry and academia. Several undergraduate students, both from GWU and historically black universities (HBCUs), have conducted research in our center through the NSF REU program, who have progressed to excellent careers and/or graduate programs at some of the leading universities in the nation.
