A team of researchers that includes UT ECE Professors Lizy K. John and Andreas Gerstlauer together with collaborators from The University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science (CS) and The Institute for Computational Sciences and Engineering (ICES) has been awarded a $750,000 grant from NSF's Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program. The project is led by Prof. George Biros (ICES) and further includes Prof. Robert van de Geijn (CS & ICES).

The grant titled "A2MA - Algorithms and Architectures for Multiresolution Applications" is concerned with investigating novel hardware and software methodologies and devices for scientific compute problems in the domains of tree-based finite element methods and N-body problems. Computational methods from these domains find broad applications in earth sciences, engineering, cosmology, biology, and data analysis. In such compute-intensive technologies, achieving energy-efficient utilization of the available computing resources is one of the key hurdles in being able to sustain performance improvements in the future. Research under this project is aimed at creating custom high-performance yet highly energy-efficient supercomputing solutions by co-designing novel algorithms and architectures that not only achieve both work optimality and energy efficiency on the algorithm side, but also explore the largely untapped potential of driving architecture customizations based on algorithm requirements.