Sun and the University of Tokyo are collaborating on two new projects that focus on High-Performance Computing (HPC) and web-based programming languages. These two projects are an outgrowth of the agreement signed in June 2005 to foster a university-corporate collaboration model and are the first international ventures stemming from the Proprius21 scheme championed by the University of Tokyo for producing results from research collaborations with the private sector.

The two research topics are:

• Development of a library based on skeletal parallel programming in Fortress
• Implementation of a multiple virtual machine (MVM) environment on Ruby and JRuby

"We are very pleased to announce the commencement of two research projects with Sun Microsystems. We believe our close relationship can create knowledge contributing to both industrial and academic fields," said Koichi Yamada, managing director of the University of Tokyo.

"We are delighted to be backing the work at the University of Tokyo, which we expect to help enable a quantum leap in the scaling abilities of modern Web frameworks like Ruby on Rails," said Jim Parkinson, vice president developer, Tools and Services, Sun Microsystems.

One group, led by Professor Masato Takeichi and Associate Professor Zhenjiang Hu at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, will collaborate with Dr. Guy Steele and his team at Sun Labs to develop a library based on skeletal parallel programming in Fortress (a programming language designed by Sun for high-performance computing). It is hoped this collaborative research will significantly enhance the convenience of parallel programming. The results will be disclosed under an OSI-approved license.

The skeletal parallelism programming method uses pre-defined components (skeletons) extracted from general-purpose parallel processing constructs to make parallelization process simpler and more scalable. At the same time, skeletal parallelism shields programmers from the complexity of parallelism such as task communication and synchronization. Furthermore, the project will examine the use of constructive algorithmic as a means of mathematically understanding the structure of programs to facilitate program generation and improve the efficiency through program transformation.

Sun developed Fortress "to do for Fortran what Java-based technologies have done for C" by enabling highly productive programming constructs. The wide-ranging language constructs of Fortress and the knowledge gained from the study of skeletal parallel programming are expected to produce a synergy effect. Once the theoretical and implementation issues of the programming language are clearly defined, researchers will attempt the development of a library.

A second team, led by Professor Ikuo Takeuchi at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology will collaborate with Sun's Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and the members of the JRuby team to implement a MVM environment on both Ruby and JRuby. The goal of this project is to have the MVM environment make Ruby programs run more efficiently than was previously possible. The results of the research are scheduled to be open sourced via the broader community of Ruby developers, which could inspire further innovations.

It has been the experience of those running more than one application simultaneously on Ruby that multiple interpreters were necessary, leading to excessive memory consumption. It is expected that the proposed MVM environment could generate multiple VM instances on a single interpreter, allowing applications to run more efficiently. The collaborative research aims to clarify such technical issues as the definition of common interfaces for using MVM, parallelization of VM instances and memory sharing, and then to implement technologies that can be used on Ruby and JRuby.

Sun and the University of Tokyo plan to explore the possibility of conducting joint R&D into next-generation technologies in the fields of digital campuses, e-learning, and computer sciences. Specifically, collaborative research projects on security, compilers, HPC tools, and mobile technologies are under consideration to satisfy the market needs in the near future. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter