INTERCONNECTS

The NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC, pronounced "Shreck") is a new research center and consortium under the auspices of the Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program at the National Science Foundation. The lead institution is the University of Florida (UF) c/o the HCS Lab. The partner institution is the George Washington University (GWU) c/o the HPCL Lab. Two additional partner schools are officially pending. Founding research partners in this center and consortium via funded memberships with UF and/or GWU include NSA, NASA/GSFC, Honeywell, AFRL/MN, Smiths Aerospace, Rockwell Collins, IBM Research, ORNL, Sandia, ONR, NASA/MSFC, NASA/LaRC, ARSC, SGI, HP, Intel, and Linux Networx. The history of CHREC began with a letter of intent submitted to the I/UCRC program at NSF in December 2004 and subsequently approved. A planning-grant proposal was submitted in September 2005 and awarded by NSF in early 2006. The CHREC Planning Workshop was held in April 2006, and the full Center proposal was submitted to NSF in July. CHREC was subsequently selected as NSF's newest center and officially awarded on September 5, 2006. Operations will officially commence with the CHREC Kickoff Workshop for university and member partners in December of 2006. High performance and reconfigurable computing, the focus of CHREC, hold tremendous promise in addressing the needs of a broad range of applications, in areas such as signal and image processing, cryptology, communications processing, data and text mining, optimization, bioinformatics, and complex system simulations, for a variety of platform types, from leading-edge machines on earth to mission-critical machines in space. Advantages from a reconfigurable approach can be realized in terms of performance, power, size, cooling, cost, versatility, scalability, and dependability to name a few, important facets where conventional computing infrastructure alone is proving unable to meet the needs of an increasing number of critical applications. More information on CHREC is available at its Web site.