News Story

DARPA Funding for AESOP Project

Associate Professor Rajeev Barua (electrical and computer engineering/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]) is the University of Maryland's principal investigator (PI) for a large research grant recently acquired through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

This research program, known as AESOP, or Adaptive Environment for Supercompiling with Optimized Parallelism, represents a major multi-institution collaboration to develop a state-of-the-art compiler that can compile serial programs automatically into parallel programs to a wide variety of platforms.

The University of Maryland will collaborate with BAE Systems Inc. and Princeton University on this four-year, $11.5 million DARPA-sponsored program, with the University of Maryland's share consisting of $2.53 million. Barua is the lead University of Maryland PI; Alan Sussman (University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies/computer science [CS]) and Rance Cleaveland (ISR/CS) are co-PIs.

Reflecting the belief that serial programs will continue to represent the vast majority of programs in the world, the goal of the AESOP project is to compile serial programs automatically into parallel programs. Unlike existing efforts which have focused on regular, scientific programs alone, the AESOP project will use an aggressive suite of existing methods and new techniques that the researchers have developed to extract large-amounts of scalable parallelism even from seemingly serial irregular programs. This will enable software to exploit the full potential of the hardware in the modern multi-core era. Further, the compiler will accurately characterize and compile to a wide variety of computer systems without any manual effort.

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July 28, 2009