Slashdot Mirror
Beowulf Pioneer Lured From Cal Tech to LSU
An anonymous reader writes "Thomas Sterling, a pioneer of clustered computing, including /.'s beloved Beowulf cluster, has has accepted a fully-tenured professorship at Louisiana State University's Center for Computation and Technology, ditching his old post at Cal Tech. From TFA: "At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence. By making computer chips more efficient, Sterling believes he can change computing by "one to three orders of magnitude" that will transform how humans interact with technology.""
i know its hopeless..but,
his work these days centers around efficiencies of access gained by putting the dram and processing elements on the same die. partially removing the serialization associated with the standard synchronous memory interface. The architecture also plans on using MTA-style threads to hide latency and increase concurrency.
citeseer
Article text -- the last thing a Louisiana news site needs right now is a Slashdotting!
... in the way we put technology on a chip, the way we organize the technology, the way we make the chips work with each other," he said. "We're using the same model we used 50 or 60 years ago developed in the vacuum tube era."
When higher education officials lobbied for the "LONI" fiber-optic computer network, they called it the ultimate economic development tool that would attract top researchers and federal dollars to the state.
Last September, Gov. Kathleen Blanco committed $40 million over 10 years to build and maintain LONI, which will link eight university campuses to a national network of supercomputers, called the National LambdaRail.
LONI, which stands for Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, has landed a major trophy to the state.
Dr. Thomas Sterling, who helped revolutionize the modern supercomputer, has accepted a position at LSU's Center for Computation and Technology.
At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true Artificial Intelligence.
By making computer chips more efficient, Sterling believes he can change computing by "one to three orders of magnitude" that will transform how humans interact with technology.
"We'll finally stop interfacing with a computer with a keypad," he said. "It's a truly science fiction dream of talking to computers and computers talking back to you."
A senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Sterling holds six patents and co-created the modern "Beowulf" supercomputer, which combines multiple off-the-shelf CPUs into one operation.
LSU offered him full professorship and tenure. He starts Aug. 22, he said.
"We lured him away from Cal Tech. It was a real coup," said Dr. Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Basic Sciences at LSU
Sterling, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT, said LSU offered the most exciting program and package, especially with LONI going live this fall.
"I would not have come to CCT if not for LONI -- I can't be starved for bits," he said. "Louisiana has positioned itself to being absolutely top-tier when it comes to Internet access for data movement."
Carman also pointed to CCT director Ed Seidel, who has organized the center to collaborate with other departments that use high-performance computing.
Seidel joined LSU in 2003, moving from the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany.
"Ed Seidel is internationally known in his own right. That's what initially attracted (Sterling). If it hadn't been for that, we would not be on the radar," Carman said. "He told me he never imagined moving to Louisiana."
The appointment of former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe as LSU chancellor helped as well. "It put LSU on the map to many of us in the high-tech industry," Sterling said.
O'Keefe has close ties to Washington, D.C., and "understands money, politics and running a very large organization driven by technology and science," Sterling said.
Sterling will bring his research to LSU which involves developing a computer processor called "MIND," which stands for Memory, Intelligence and Network Device.
The MIND architecture uses a new multi-core chip that stacks several processors on a single chip -- similar to those in the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3 game device -- but with greater efficiency, Sterling said.
"Play Station 3 is putting lots more of these functional units on chips, but it's not clear we know how to make them work more effectively together," he said.
Processors generally dedicate a single functioning body that's surrounded by "clever tricks" and mechanisms that keep it working, he said.
"There are many sources of inefficiencies
Sterling said the work -- along with other CCT initiatives -- could "catalyze a new industry and bring new talent to Louisiana."
He envisions building his prototype in
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
In short, he has been given a job for life to do research almost nobody expects anything from anymore.
:P
Really, that sums up the LSU computer science department. It's just a show pony to say "Look how cool we are!" because they're in the same city as the Legislature... Nevermind their supercomputer (SuperMike) hasn't even been successfully turned on yet. Nevermind the ULL Computer Science department is significantly older and respected the world over... Let's give the money and the press to LSU...
Not that I'm bitter or anything...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Allow me to clear up your thinking. Consider Proteus. It is a high-performance simulator written at MIT for MIPS. Some graduate student at LSU ported it to SPARC.
This work is stunningly brilliant and egalitarian.
In the late '80s and early 90s, the eggheads at MIT and Stanford felt that they need only develop simulators for their clique-ish processor: MIPS. Yet, the rest of the world was using SPARC. In this way, the eggheads cornered multiprocessor research for themselves.
LSU actually opened up multiprocessor research to the rest of the world by building a simulator that actually runs on the SPARC machines.
To be fair, I should note that a small team at Stanford did the same thing with ABSS, another simulator that runs on SPARC machines.