CI-P: Community Infrastructure to Catalyze Research in Automata Computing

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

Micron Technology has announced a new hardware accelerator, the Automata Processor, and helped establish a center at the University of Virginia to facilitate training for potential users, help create a research community around this paradigm, and catalyze new collaborations. The Automata Processor is designed to enable massively parallel pattern recognition. It is claimed that speedups of 10-1000X or greater are possible on a wide range of applications involving complex pattern matching, such as in bioinformatics, cybersecurity, data mining, and natural language processing. While the potential impact of automata computing technology is significant, no automata computing infrastructure currently exists to catalyze new research opportunities around this technology. This planning project will bring together a broad-based community of Computer and Information Science and Engineering researchers who can develop new applications of, and advance the capabilities of automata computing, with the goal of defining the needs of a community infrastructure involving automata technology, and defining the needs for a future, full Community Infrastructure-New proposal. Researchers from diverse institutions will be invited to participate in this planning project. These researchers and their students will learn about the technical capabilities of the Automata Processor and new models for heterogeneous computing, and will have the opportunity to engage with an emerging research community as well as to begin initial research and educational projects involving automata technology. Because of its widespread commercial potential, new technologies developed by users of the community infrastructure are likely to have high value as communal research artifacts, with numerous licensing possibilities or the potential to form spin-off companies.