EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The University of Texas at Austin appreciates the opportunity to respond to Intel's request for proposal. This grant will stimulate advanced research in distributed computing applications and simultaneously accelerate growth of collaborations necessary to transform graduate education. The proposed program will develop a campus-wide imperative for distributed high-performance computing at The University of Texas at Austin that will advance The University's strategic plan for leadership in the digital and information sciences and leverage considerable investment of resources and progress in this area. It promises to create an impact as significant as previous major cooperative projects undertaken by IBM in the 1970s and Apple in the 1980s. In this proposal, it is critical to form an alliance with Intel and affiliated corporate partners in order to assure relevance and dissemination of technology results.
The University has identified a broad set of computationally demanding tasks that are technically compelling and highly visible in the fields of engineering, science, multimedia, communications, graphics, entertainment, business and information science. Research in all these areas will amply demonstrate the capabilities of and possible challenges to Intel Architecture across the full range of available and future Intel systems. These systems will primarily run under the Microsoft Windows NT operating system and existing applications and enabling technologies will be migrated to the Intel/NT environment. The research projects draw domain experts together in cross disciplinary and interdisciplinary applications and together they work with information technology practitioners to tune and assess the performance characteristics of the Intel Architecture in a range of computationally demanding areas. This grant complements and leverages existing and future national research initiatives such as NPACI and vBNS. The University commits the necessary resources such as technical expertise, domain expertise, physical plant, software and management to ensure the success of this strategic partnership with Intel.
The three strategic thrusts of this proposal are distributed multimedia, advanced simulation and modeling, and enterprise systems management. Projects in each of those areas speak to creating new knowledge and applications of Intel Architecture to demanding tasks, and through that process, transforming existing research and pedagogical practices. This document describes a broad-based, coordinated and fully integrated interdisciplinary research program operating across The University's academic and research communities, involving arts, science, communication and engineering. The proposal includes the development of enabling technologies that push demanding applications and the corresponding development of demanding applications that pull the development of computing architectures and technologies. The research program has two goals:
The overall research program will be led through a partnership between Texas Institute for Computational Mathematics (TICAM) and Academic Computing and Instructional Technology Services (ACITS). TICAM is a general umbrella for research in computational and applied mathematics, while ACITS is the key support organization for academic computing, networking, and instructional technology. Administrative management will be provided by a project manager reporting to the leadership organizations and working with an executive committee representing the three major thrust areas of the program. Each year a one-day symposium will be held on campus, where faculty and students can share reports on their research. Additionally, all project faculty members will participate in regularly scheduled colloquia designed to facilitate information sharing across disciplines. We would welcome Intel's attendance and participation in these events.
We have prepared an equipment request totaling $5,996,318 (all hardware). Approximately $4 million of equipment is required for the first year. The University of Texas at Austin will acquire software using institutional and leveraged research funds. We will also seek additional support from other industrial members in the Alliance.