At its core, IBM is a computer company; and IBM researchers have made seminal contributions to the computer architecture field. Here are some of our exciting research activities in the computer architecture area. You may also want to review some of our earlier projects to get an idea of work we have done in the past.
Projects
- Blue Gene
A supercomputer project aiming to tackle the protein folding grand challenge with petaflop performance that produced the world's fastest supercomputer.
- CELL Architecture
This project with Sony and Toshiba has created a supercomputer-on-a-chip for a new wave of devices in the emerging broadband era.
- Compiler Technology for Scalable Architectures
"Single source" compiler solutions targeting heterogeneous parallelism (MIMD/SIMD, shared/distributed memory, heterogeneous cores) in Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures.
- Embedded DRAM (eDRAM)
As CMOS scaling becomes increasingly difficult, low-power, dense bit storage is needed for microprocessor caches. Building upon circuit-level work begun in the 1990's, the Computer Architecture department continues to make innovative contributions to next-generation caches.
- MET
The MET (Microarchitecture Exploration Toolset) project addresses the exploration of options in the design of PowerPC processors. The effort has led to the development and use of fast simulation tools for microarchitecture tradeoffs.
- Power-aware design
Research on power and complexity-aware microprocessor design, analysis and validation.
- Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System
(PERCS) DARPA-funded project for ground-breaking research in revolutionary chip technology, new computer architecture, operating systems, compilers and programming environments.
- Reliability-Aware Microarchitectures
This project is focused on microarchitectural support to ensure reliable operation, in the face of hard and soft hardware failures.
- Systems Technology and Microarchitecture
This project focuses on exploration of the fundamental design principles that govern the performance of computer systems using both analytical tools, and detailed simulations. Innovations from this research are applied to the design of the system Z processor, and the memory subsystem.
Publications and presentations
Last updated on January 19, 2009