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.""

Comments

PIM

[convolvatron]

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

Score 1 for the Hicks

[Anonymous Coward]

LSU sounds like some backwater 2-bit university that can accomplish almost nothing. Most of you geeks are thinking that nasty thought at this very moment.

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.