IBM, UAE University to drive advanced processor research

The university's College of IT is one of the 10 universities worldwide to be granted with IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) Award, an IBM worldwide program which supports the advancement of university projects by fostering collaboration between academia and industry to explore research in areas essential to fueling innovation. For the first time, each of these universities will be using the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) technology, a highly optimised processor for compute-intensive and broadband rich media applications, to drive innovation and foster skill development among students and the faculty.

"IBM maintains its commitment to the education sector and is constantly offering programmes that will develop the skills among students in the region," said Takreem El Tohamy, general manager, IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. "IBM's SUR Award is a major initiative in fostering innovation and research and development projects to stimulate technology adoption and contribute to the development of an innovation-based society in the Middle East."

Leveraging the SUR award, the UAE University will establish the first Cell Centre of Competency, C-cube, in the Middle East. C-cube; a research and development centre based around the development of applications for the advanced IBM Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor, will house application and tool development projects, porting open source applications and libraries, research projects, training and workshop events, and will support educational and software enabling efforts. The UAE University has received 3 Cell Broadband Engines under IBM's SUR program and will focus on utiliising this technology to accelerate the oil reservoir simulation and seismic applications.

The revolutionary Cell/B.E. processor, already included in the IBM Cell blade, is a breakthrough design featuring a central processing core based on IBM's industry-leading Power Architecture technology and eight synergistic processing elements. The Cell/B.E., which also appears in the Sony PLAYSTATION 3, supercharges compute-intensive applications, offering fast performance for computing environments such as real-time video chat, interactive TV shows, wireless downloads and computer entertainments.

"This research center will be very valuable to our university and the UAE as it will help develop the skills required to program and optimize the multicore processors of the future," said Dr. Hadef Al-Dhahiri, Vice Chancellor of UAE University. "This is a pioneering step for open education and promoting an integrated and collaborative learning environment; it will allow UAEU to explore and research the various methods that will enhance a variety of computationally intensive workloads of the petroleum market including seismic imaging, reservoir modeling and yield optimization."

IBM's highly selective SUR program awards computing equipment, software, and services globally to higher education institutions in order to facilitate research projects of mutual interest, including: the architecture of business and processes, real-time data analysis, privacy and security, supply chain management, information based medicine, deep computing, event-driven computing, and storage solutions. The SUR awards also support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers in academia with IBM researchers, along with representatives from product development and solution provider communities. IBM supports more than 50 SUR awards per year worldwide.