The Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) is the premier research center in Greece, internationally acknowledged for its excellence in basic and applied research, in developing applications and products, and in providing services. The Institute of Computer Science (ICS), one of the seven Institutes of FORTH, will be contributing to this project. FORTH-ICS has a 27-year history of internationally competitive R&D contributions across the fields of Information & Communication Technologies, as well as of academic and industrial cooperation; it has adopted an evolving strategy to promote the commercial exploitation of R&D results by providing services, licensing products to industrial partners, contracting with industrial partners to jointly develop new products, and participating in spin-off companies and joint ventures. FORTH-ICS represents Greece in the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). The Institute ranked first among all Greek institutes of its field in both of the two national evaluation rounds so far.
Contributions to this project will come from the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems (CARV) Laboratory of FORTH-ICS; it has a 24-year history in architecture, hardware, and systems software R&D, with fundamental contributions in interconnection network architectures, in cluster computing, and, more recently, in scalable systems, in runtime systems and parallel programming and applications, in storage and I/O subsystems, and in infrastructure services engineering. CARV expertise includes the design, implementation, and test of dozens of innovative FPGA, ASIC, board, and System Software prototypes.
In Interconnection Networks, FORTH-ICS worked in 1986-92 on fair queueing, backpressure, congestion tolerance, weighted round-robin scheduling, and multiprocessor interconnects; in 1996-98, a 6-million-transistor switch chip was designed and built; recent contributions were in wormhole IP over ATM, weighted fair queueing, congestion elimination in switching fabrics, buffered crossbars, and high-radix crossbar networks-on-chip (NoC).
In Scalable Architectures, FORTH-ICS has an 18-year history: in the Telegraphos project (1993-95), workstation clustering prototypes were designed and built, including processor network interfaces for protected user-level communication. In the last 8 years, FORTH-ICS works on low-latency and high-bandwidth communication in chip multiprocessors, and in scalable parallel processing – at the layers of hardware architecture and runtime system, and their interactions. Contributions in the area of runtime systems are in dynamic extraction and scheduling of parallelism, locality management, synchronization protocols, scalable software-managed coherence, and integration with programming languages and models.
In Storage and I/O Architectures, FORTH-ICS has built two large scale working prototypes, currently used for further research: a scalable distributed storage prototype, with the full I/O stack in the system kernel developed in-house; and a 10-Gbit/s communication subsystem and SAN (storage area network) prototype, including the hardware platform and the full software stack. CARV currently coordinates the IOLanes and TransForm projects, and participates in the Stream, CumuloNimbo, Encore, Text, and Scalus projects.