The IMPACT Group has become a major source of advanced compiler technology for the U.S. microprocessor industry. Our work on superblocks and hyperblocks has become part of the technology base of new compilers in major corporations such as Sun Microsystems, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, AMD, Lucent, and Motorola, all of whom have licensed our IMPACT compiler for technology transfer. And when Intel and HP announced their IA-64 (Itanium) product line in 1997, they publicly acknowledged their use of IMPACT in deriving critical early-performance results for the new architecture. More recently, the superblock techniques have been incorporated into GCC.

About Us - Future

Application-Driven Computing Growth

If the past is an accurate predictor of the future (as we computer architects like to assume), next-generation architectures and software will be dictated by today's emerging applications. The need for codebreaking and ordnance delivery tables drove innovation in the early computers of the 1940s. A decade later, John Backus and his team at IBM designed FORTRAN to render the scientific algorithms of the day in a form both natural for a programmer to express and easy for a compiler to optimize. More recently, in the RISC era, HP's PA-RISC architects intensively studied workstation application needs in designing new machines. Today the desire for realistic audiovisual experiences in gaming and digital content creation is driving the design of heterogeneous, highly parallel architectures such as the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell. Situations and implementation constraints may vary, but what remains consistent from the era of tubes to today's billion-transistor-plus chips is the fact that necessity - not raw possibility - is the mother of invention.
So what applications will actually drive the next wave of computing technology development? We see two broad "driver applications" dominating in the next 10 to 20 years:

1. First is digital content creation and audiovisual experience delivery. These applications share both necessity (rapidly growing markets) and immediate possibility (inherent parallelism facilitating short-order solutions). The IMPACT Group is already using diverse coding, decoding, and manipulation algorithms to experiment with ultra-efficient alternatives to classical computer architectures. Today's industry faces a conundrum: single-purpose silicon solutions are too expensive and too transitory for most of these applications, but classical programmable architectures can't deliver the desired performance-per-watt. IMPACT members consider this an opportunity to use powerful software tools to rebalance the hardware / software equation. In particular, we are attacking the memory interface: typical software assumes a uniform interface to memory -- which is an increasingly challenging abstraction to maintain in highly parallel and distributed systems. New architectures, like IBM Cell and those proposed by our group, distribute the memory interface to reduce complexity and increase available access to parallelism. The downside is that this strategy complicates the programming model. IMPACT's memory access analysis tools will continue to evolve to address this important problem, healing the growing breach between productive programming models and efficient execution architectures.

2. Second is biochemical / biomedical simulation and modeling. The human genome has been mapped and the biochemical industry is beginning to be able to identify and measure a broad array of proteins with sophisticated sensing devices. But the promised dividends in disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment have not yet materialized. Just as computing revolutionized codebreaking, it will also help glean useful information from this ever-increasing muddle of biological and chemical data. The IMPACT Group is beginning to investigate these areas in collaboration with leading researchers in these fields. But finding effective solutions to these big-iron problems will take more than just connecting huge clusters of COTS workstations. And at the same time, the scalability of those solutions is becoming limited by slower per-processor performance and tighter and tighter limits on acceptable power consumption and dissipation. As our research in this area develops, we will apply our experience with ultra-efficient computing solutions to this exciting new realm of grand challenge problems, where we plan to have real societal IMPACT. We are excited about our work and what the future promises.

The IMPACT Research Group is ideally positioned to push our vision of next-generation computing and find the best solutions. Our location in the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory puts us in the epicenter of one of the most densely populated computing and scientific communities in the USA, including biochemical simulation and stochastic modeling. Our solid connections with industry and academic researchers give us additional insight into both up-and-coming applications and state-of-the art implementation techniques. Join us in shaping the future.