Two faculty members in the UCLA Computer Science department have been named part of a major public-private consortium that is aiming for big gains in the performance, efficiency and capabilities of broad classes of information and communication technologies.
The partnership, Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0), was co-funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) composed of a group of 19 global semiconductor companies and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Announced earlier this month, JUMP 2.0 supports seven major research centers, each of which is headquartered at a U.S. university.
One of those research areas is intelligent memory and storage — an effort to combine computer hardware and software into a more seamlessly intertwined framework — at the Center for Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory (PRISM) led by UC San Diego with collaboration from researchers at UCLA Samueli. Jason Cong, a professor of computer science, and Yizhou Sun, an associate professor of computer science, will focus their work on expediting cloud computing memory and storage technologies, expanding their capabilities toward “unlimited” bandwidth and storage.
Supported by $525,000 in annual funding for five years, Cong and Sun will also focus on incorporating intelligent memory and storage technologies into data-intensive projects. Such efforts will include discovering new drugs and developing artificial intelligence–powered systems that incorporate reasoning — the process of using logic to draw conclusions from data.
“UCLA has a long history of working with the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s Focus Center Program since its inception in 1998, and we look forward to another five years of exciting research as part of PRISM and the JUMP 2.0 program,” said Cong, who also holds UCLA’s Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence. “We believe that our research on new acceleration technology for intelligent memory and storage systems will have a significant impact on numerous data-intensive applications.”