Irish researchers join international 'Cuda team'

An Irish computer research team has been invited to collaborate on the development of Cuda, a new computer programming language

IRELAND’S MOST advanced computer research centre has been selected as one of only seven locations worldwide that will focus on a new kind of high-performance computing.

And while the research will use some of the most powerful computer technology in the world, ultimately it will benefit the public – opening up its use to deliver improved medical diagnosis, analyse cancer or study climate change.

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (Ichec, pronounced I-check) has just been asked to join with six other centres in the US, Australia, China, Finland and the Czech Republic to become a “Cuda Research Centre”, says Ichec associate director Dr Jean-Christophe Desplat. (Cuda, a new computer language, stands for Compute Unified Development Architecture.)

Ichec is a dedicated facility that makes massive computer power available for academic researchers and collaborative private sector research.

It will now join Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Nanyang and Ostrava universities, CSIRO in Australia and Sintef in Finland who already participate in an international initiative to develop Cuda.

The processing speed of computers has been limited by the physical characteristics of the microchips they use, explains Desplat.

But in 2007 Santa Clara company NVidia – the 1999 inventor of the graphics processor chip – found a way to use these very high-speed graphics chips in non-graphics areas.

NVidia developed a new computer language, Cuda, to merge graphics and conventional microchips and in the process boosted speeds significantly. In some cases processing speeds increased by 1,000 times, says Desplat.

Ichec researchers knew about Cuda and separately had begun research into the use of graphics chips to speed up computers.

Its expertise developed to the point that NVidia became aware of its involvement and invited Ichec to join the Cuda research grouping.

The speeds achieved by these hybrid supercomputers is staggering. Computer speeds are measured in “flops” or floating point operations per second, for example computing an addition or subtraction.

The Nebulae supercomputer based at Shenzen, China, uses this hybrid architecture to carry out one thousand million million flops per second.

Irish scientists will now be able to make use of this Cuda-based high performance computing power, says Desplat. And academic researchers and the public in general will benefit.

Established in 2005 as the Irish higher education national high performance computing centre, Ichec has supported about 300 research projects and 500 users, says Desplat.

It has three key missions including enabling advanced academic research, providing a leadership role in high-performance computing and in technology transfer so that people can benefit directly from the research.

In this case the research is not all about computing, it is about using hugely powerful computers to accomplish other aims, says Desplat. “It is about developing real life pragmatic solutions to real life problems.”

Examples include improving the quality of ultrasound imaging in medical diagnosis, the computer analysis of potential new cancer drugs, a significantly more accurate model for predicting how climate change might affect Ireland and for the design of new materials.