The work requires lots of people. Kennedy is working with Rice's computer science experts Keith Cooper, Linda Torczon, Robert Hood, Charles Koelbel, John Mellor-Crummey and Mary Hall. The team collaborates with experts from Syracuse University, the University of Tennessee and the California Institute of Technology. Rice is a year away from having a prototype that the industry will be able to use, Kennedy says. Essentially Kennedy and his colleagues are creating a whole new kind of software.
Algorithms are the mathematical core of software.
They consist mostly of ordinary arithmetic calculations, such as subtraction, addition, multiplication and division. Most algorithms have been written with single processors in mind. Kennedy's task at CRPC is to develop algorithms that can handle large numbers of processors effectively. Fourteen members of Rice's math science department are working on algorithms, along with researchers from four universities and two national laboratories. The United States' chief competition in the race for parallel computing is, not surprisingly, Japan.