News Briefs - Hardware:

Univ Of Texas To Develop SuperChip

The University of Texas will use an $11.1 million federal grant to design a ground-breaking computer chip with supercomputing capabilities, the university announced Wednesday.

A team of UT computer scientists has developed a new architecture to deliver more than one trillion operations per second on a single microprocessor by 2010. They will collaborate will Austin's IBM Corp. Research Lab on the project and ultimately bring advanced technology to the marketplace.

Prototypes of the new architecture called TRIPS, or Tera-op Reliable Intelligently-adaptive Processing System, should be running in the UT labs by December 2005, according to UT.

The UT and IBM Research project received the grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to create the system. The system will offer flexibility to work with many different types of software applications including desktop, signal processing, graphics, server and scientific applications, according to UT and IBM.

"As a result of this project, we'll develop effective capabilities to produce chips with tens of processors whereas our most sophisticated chips today contain just two," says Jeff Burns, Technical Strategist for IBM Research.

The chip will contain more than 250 million transistors and will operate at 500 megahertz. The joint UT/ IBM Research team is consulting with IBM Microelectronics on initial chip-design considerations, and it's expected that IBM Microelectronics will be the physical-design and fabrication partner for the TRIPS chip, according to IBM.

The graduate program of the Department of Computer Sciences at UT is ranked in the top 10 nationally by U.S. News & World Report. Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp. employs 6,300 people in Austin.