Technical and research profile

As a general aim, this Group targets to carry out research in the field of high performance computing. By itself, this target brings to the foreground the basic concept of interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity. In fact, the solution of emerging problems in many fields of science and technology very often demands incredible amounts of computational resources, both in terms of processing time and in storage capacity. Traditional or out-of-the-box solutions do not work any more.

This fact has fuelled the creation of new areas of knowledge where the key terms often include the word computational. Disciplines such as Computational Electromagnetism , Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Mechanics, have emerged and are now commonplace. All of them share the quest for strong developments in areas ranging from Applied Mathematics to Computer Sciences. We are really talking about Scientific Computation.

The current Group is involved and tries to yield results in a number of different settings, including but not limited to,

• Computer architecture, a field where the Group is involved in the analysis of the impact on superscalar performance of the instruction set architecture, with the purpose of extracting more computing power from the processors.
• Algorithms, specially those oriented to distributed computing and load balancing in heterogeneous environments. Today it is no news that the computing power demanded to solve current problems in science and technology cannot be met by single systems, but only by using clusters and grids of computers.
• Analysis and development of new computing models, such as Quanting Computing, which appears to display a very promising future in order to achieve a real boost in the computing power available at one’s finger tips.

Moreover, the Group supports other groups in activities such as parallelizing existing sequential code, a very common situation for many applications. Besides, the group gives support and technical advice to implement the new parallel software in a number of distributed computing platforms (clusters, grids, graphic processor units, etc), thus fostering a multidisciplinary approach to the solution.

Legal

The Group has been approved on November 29, 2007 and it has been assigned the reference CCTT2007/F40 in the Research Groups File (activity Group of Technological Sciences) of the Universidad de Alcalá