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IBM Announces Winners of Shared University Research Awards

Posted on: Tuesday, 12 December 2006, 09:00 CST

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that ten universities spanning multiple geographies have been chosen as winners of the latest IBM Shared University Research (SUR) awards. For the first time, each of the universities will be using the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (Cell/B.E.) technology to enable students and faculty to drive innovation, collaborate and foster skill development in the creation of digital media, software platform performance and medical imaging solutions.

As research helps drive innovation and growth, new skills are required to staff the emerging disciplines and technologies, leading to tremendous opportunities to drive Cell/B.E. technology into multiple areas.

"Because of its ability to handle compute-intensive applications, we are seeing tremendous demand to incorporate Cell/B.E. microprocessor technology in a host of products, solutions and opportunities outside of gaming," said Lilian Wu, Program Executive, IBM University Relations and Innovation. "All of these universities have very unique ideas on how they think Cell/B.E. technology can be applied to help solve different problems, as well as using the technology to encourage skill development among its students and faculty. IBM is proud to collaborate with these universities to make these innovation ideas possible."

The ten winning universities include:

North America

 --  Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia): The College of     Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology will undertake a research     project to test high performance computing, gaming and digital content     applications on Cell/B.E. technology, as well as port and optimize key     Cell/B.E. libraries for data, video and image processing. --  University of California San Diego (San Diego, California): UCSD's     Experimental Game Lab will use Cell/B.E. technology to accelerate     computation in their applications, making more aspects of game environments     a part of a user's real-time interactive experience. --  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: The University will look     into developing programming models for the Cell Broadband Engine along with     applying Cell/B.E. technology in the continuing development of high     performance computing applications including molecular dynamics and     cosmology simulations. --  University of Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota): The     University of Minnesota will investigate Cell/B.E. implementation on     numerical algorithms for fluid dynamics. --  University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia): The University's     Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities will be using Cell/B.E.     technology to develop a real-time 3D rendering model of the City of Rome in     AD400, for both classroom and research in the Institute's new 3D theater. --  University of Washington (Seattle, Washington): The University's     Department of Bioengineering will explore the use of Cell/B.E. technology     in various medical imaging modalities.  Specifically, they will design a     fully programmable ultrasound machine architecture that can be scaled from     sophisticated high-end systems to low-cost units for use in doctors'     offices and in the home.      

Europe, Middle East and Asia

 --  Barcelona Supercomputing Center at the Technical University of     Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain): The Center will investigate innovative     programming models for scientific and technical computing for life     sciences, earth sciences and engineering. --  Tsinghua University (Beijing, China): Tsinghua University in China     will implement Cell/B.E. technology to test real-time multi-view video     coding and rendering, taking multi-view images from the real world and     modeling them for the virtual world to implement interactive streaming     applications. --  United Arab Emirates University (Al-Ain, UAE): The College of     Information Technology at the United Arab Emirates University will develop     a set of new applications for the Cell/B.E. technology in the areas of     seismic imaging and parallel oil reservoir simulations which are of     particular importance in the oil industry. --  University of Dublin Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland): The University     will be implementing Cell/B.E. technology with the goal to create realistic     animation of human motion, which is critical to the development of computer     and video games and movies.      

The revolutionary Cell/B.E. processor is a breakthrough design featuring a central processing core, based on IBM's industry-leading Power Architecture(TM) technology, and eight synergistic processing elements (SPE). Cell/B.E. "supercharges" compute-intensive applications, offering fast performance for computer entertainment and handhelds, virtual reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows and other "image-hungry" computing environments. The groundbreaking Cell/B.E. processor appears in products such as Sony Computer Entertainment's PLAYSTATION(R)3, Toshiba's Cell/B.E Reference Set, a development tool for Cell/B.E. products, and already is included in the IBM BladeCenter(R) QS20, or "Cell Blade." The Cell/B.E. processor is also used through joint collaboration with Mercury Computer Systems, Inc., targeted at aerospace and defense, semiconductor, medical imaging, and other markets.

IBM's highly selective SUR program awards computing equipment, software, and services globally to higher education institutions in order to facilitate research projects of mutual interest, including: the architecture of business and processes, real-time data analysis, privacy and security, supply chain management, information based medicine, deep computing, event-driven computing, and storage solutions. The SUR awards also support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers in academia with IBM researchers, along with representatives from product development and solution provider communities. IBM supports more than 50 SUR awards per year worldwide.

About IBM

For more information on IBM's SUR award project, please visit: http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/university/scholars/sur/

For more information on IBM Technology Collaboration Solutions, please visit http://www.ibm.com/technology.

IBM, BladeCenter, Power Architecture and QS20 are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

PLAYSTATION is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

See http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.

 Contact: Charles Zinkowski IBM Global Media Relations 631-294-6201 charlesz@us.ibm.com

SOURCE: IBM

Source: MARKET WIRE

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