Jump Announces New Research Centers

The Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), a research initiative within the New Science Team (NST), has announced a new collaborative network of research centers. The JUMP program is administered by Semiconductor Research Corporation, a consortium of technology companies, universities, and government agencies. In addition to industry support, the new centers will also receive funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The centers are:

ASCENT: Advanced Devices, Packaging, and Materials - Notre Dame

ADA: Advanced Architecture and Algorithms - University of Michigan

CRISP: Intelligent Memory and Storage - University of Virginia

CONIX: Distributed Computing and Networking - Carnegie Mellon University

CBRIC: Cognitive Computing - Purdue University

ComSenTer: Converged TeraHerz Communication and Sensing - University of California Santa Barbara

The goal of the new JUMP centers is to “tackle fundamental physical problems and forge a nationwide effort to keep the United States and its technology firms at the forefront of the global microelectronics revolution.” Each center will support graduate and undergraduate research from within the host institution, and each will coordinate work with scientists at other institutions.

All the centers cover important topics pertinent to the HPC community. The CRISP center at University of Virginia has perhaps the most unusual and potentially revolutionary assignment. Since the beginning of the computer industry, processors and memory have always been considered separate components. CRISP will study new ways of achieving closer integration of processors and memory, which could lead to better performance by breaking down the so-called “memory wall” that has increasingly become a bottleneck for high-end computer systems.

See the individual JUMP centers (links above) for more on the proposed research.