NEWS

Dr. Xun Liu has received an NVIDIA Professor Partnership Award for "Research and Education on VLSI Algorithm Development using CUDA and Nvidia GPUs".  NVIDIA CUDA is a software environment that utilizes the parallel compute engine of the NVIDIA graphical processing unit (GPU) to solve complex computational problems.  The award includes a grant of $25K to support Dr. Liu's research.

The project aims to apply GPU-based computing to existing VLSI CAD (computer-aided design) software programs.  The short term activities involve the manual parallelization of existing algorithms so that they can be executed on GPUs.  Design experience will be accumulated to determine algorithmic characteristics that cannot be easily migrated to GPUs.  Software solutions will then be proposed to assist the conversion of programs with the above characteristics and improve the efficiency of the resulting programs.  Finally, conversion tools will be created to implement semi-automatic parallelization of algorithms. The ultimate goal is to substantially lower the difficulty of sequential to parallel program transformation.