AUSTIN, Texas—The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a contract for $4,303,874 to the TRIPS project (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System) housed in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Computer Sciences (UTCS).
The goal of the TRIPS project is to develop a new class of technology-scalable, power efficient, high-performance microprocessor architectures. TRIPS is designed to produce an architecture that can scale down to future semiconductor processes, accelerating industrial, consumer, embedded and scientific workloads, and eventually reaching trillions of calculations per second with a single chip.
The DARPA funds, which will run from October 2005 through December 2007, will allow the researchers to evaluate the TRIPS prototype hardware on a range of application types, including signal processing, servers, desktops, scientific and embedded workloads, as well as to assist in maturing the TRIPS concepts and software for eventual transition to commercial deployment. The expected date for the operational prototype hardware is the first quarter of 2006.
The TRIPS team, led by UTCS professors Steve Keckler and Doug Burger, is composed of 30 researchers, including faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. UTCS Professor Kathryn McKinley leads the compiler portion of the TRIPS project. The project is a collaborative effort with a number of industrial partners, who will be working with the TRIPS team to develop software capabilities, evaluate the prototype hardware on key applications and analyze the technology for commercial applicability.
For more information contact: Doug Burger, 512-471-9795; Steve Keckler, 512-471-9763.