Projects
From PPL
In May 2008 Stanford University officially launched the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory (PPL). The goal of the PPL is to make parallelism accessible to average software developers so that it can be freely used in all computationally demanding applications. The PPL pools the efforts of many leading Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, NVIDIA, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Intel under a completely open industrial affiliates program. The open nature of the lab allows other companies to join the effort and does not provide any member company with exclusive intellectual property rights to the research results.
To drive the PPL research we are developing new challenging application areas that have the potential to exploit significant amounts of parallelism but also present significant software development challenges. These application areas demand enormous amounts of computing power to process large amounts of information, often in real-time. These areas include traditional scientific and engineering applications from geosciences, mechanical engineering and bio engineering; a massive virtual world including a client-side game engine and a scalable world server, personal robotics including autonomous driving vehicles and robots that can navigate home and office environments; and sophisticated data analysis applications capable of extracting information from huge amounts of data. The applications will be developed by domain experts in collaboration with PPL researchers.
The core of our research agenda is to allow the domain expert to develop parallel software without becoming an expert in parallel programming. Our approach is to use a layered system (Figure 1) based on domain-specific languages (DSLs), an object-oriented common parallel runtime system, and an underlying architecture that provides efficient mechanisms for communication, synchronization, and performance monitoring.
Individual Project Pages