The Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (CSRD) at the University of Illinois (UIUC) was a research center funded from 1984 to 1993. It built the shared memory Cedar computer system, which included four hardware multiprocessor clusters, as well as parallel system and applications software. It was distinguished from the four earlier UIUC Illiac systems by starting with commercial shared memory subsystems that were based on an earlier paper published by the CSRD founders. Thus CSRD was able to avoid many of the hardware design issues that slowed the Illiac series work. Over its 9 years of major funding, plus follow-on work by many of its participants, CSRD pioneered many of the shared memory architectural and software technologies upon which all 21st century computation is based.
History UIUC began computer research in the 1950s, initially for civil engineering problems, and eventually succeeded by cooperative activities among the Math, Physics, and Electrical Engineering Departments to build the Illiac computer series. This led to founding the Computer Science Department in 1965. By the early 1980s, a time of world-wide HPC expansion arrived, including the race with the Japanese 5th generation system targeting innovative parallel applications in AI. HPC/supercomputing had emerged as a field, commercial supercomputers were in use by industry and labs (but little by academia), and academic architecture and compiler research were expanding. This led to formation of the Lax committee. to study the academic needs of focused HPC research, and to provide commercial HPC systems for university research. When HPC practitioner Ken Wilson won the Nobel physics prize in 1982, he expanded his already strong advocacy of both, and soon several government agencies introduced HPC R&D programs. As a result, the UIUC Center for Supercomputing R&D (CSRD) was formed in 1984 (with funding from DOE, NSF, and UIUC, as well as DoD Darpa and AFOSR), under the leadership of three CS professors who had worked together since the Illiac 4 project – David Kuck (Director), Duncan Lawrie (Assoc. Dir. for SW) and Ahmed Sameh (Assoc. Dir for applications), plus Ed Davidson (Assoc. Dir. for hardware/ architecture) who joined from ECE. Many graduate students and post-docs were already contributing to constituent efforts; full time academic professionals were hired, and other faculty cooperated. A total of up to 125 people were involved at the peak, over the nine years of full CSRD operation
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