by Tim Green, UT Office of Public Affairs
September 2003

Although University of Texas at Austin computer scientists Dr. Stephen Keckler, Dr. Doug Burger, and Chuck Moore have yet to commercialize their revolutionary chip design, they have formed a very promising working relationship with a business partner that may very well lead to its future use.

Their design approach, called polymorphism, permits unprecedented performance and flexibility for running different types of software. They call the design TRIPS (Tera-Op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System), and it is to provide supercomputer performance on a single chip.

As they've developed the architecture, the researchers have worked with IBM Corp. in several ways.

"On one level, they're an affiliate of our research lab," says Moore, a senior research fellow on the project. "In exchange for giving us some support money—in the form of faculty partnership awards—we provide them with an early glimpse of our research ideas through white papers and on-site presentations at IBM."

"At another level, we are collaborating on research and development," Moore says. The lab is developing a prototype of the chip architecture under a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and is subcontracting some of the work to IBM. The company also has a DARPA contract under a separate program, and it has subcontracted some of that work to the researchers at UT.

"There is a very interesting relationship between IBM, our lab here at UT and DARPA," Moore says. "And it's all centered on very similar thinking about the future."

The relationship with IBM "validated and amplified the goals of our project here, and it also lends credibility to us because IBM is such a strong technology driver in the industry," Moore says. "And the fact that they are actually collaborating on the research indicates a very real interest for applying the ideas into products."