You have reached the home page of the former Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC). Although GSRC concluded its research charter on January 31, 2013, this site will remain active through 2013 to provide access to the GSRC website content and publications archive.

GSRC Mission:  Application and Technology Driven Platform Design for the Late- and Post-Silicon Era

Originally started in 1999, the mission of the final phase of GSRC has been to address the research challenges in the design (hardware and software) and utilization (programming and interfacing) of information system platforms for consumer/enterprise/defense applications, to be deployed in the late- and post-silicon era, in order to achieve orders of magnitude improvement in cost (design and related NRE, programming) and quality (lower power, higher functional performance, increased reliability, increased usability).

GSRC research has been driven top-down by emerging applications, and bottom-up by technology trends in materials, devices, fabrication and circuit fabrics, with the goal of developing cost-efficient platforms through future technology generations with significant novel functionality so as to enable whole new classes of application.

The center research has achieved much in its pursuit of integrated solutions for

• Managing cost challenges emerging from increased design and validation/verification complexity.
• Design and programming of highly concurrent, heterogeneous platforms while meeting tight power budgets.
• Design for resiliency under diverse threats, including potentially high-failure rate post-silicon fabrics.

Addressing these challenges has required innovative and disruptive solutions. By bringing the best minds in US academia together in a collaborative and forward-looking setting, GSRC has been uniquely positioned to deliver on these solutions. The GSRC track record has demonstrated that this model of "not research as usual" has been highly effective in producing groundbreaking results.

GSRC has been one of the six centers that comprised the SRC's Focus Center Research Program (FCRP).

Future Directions (post-GSRC):

With the conclusion of the GSRC (as well as the remaining five FCRP centers), six newly created university microelectronics research centers have been defined under the STARnet consortium. Funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), STARnet seeks to support the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Two of the newly formed STARnet centers, C-FAR (The Center for Future Architectures Research) and SONIC (Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs) represent an ideal continuation of several of the research themes previously pursued under the GSRC. More specifically:

• C-FAR seeks to research future scalable computer systems architectures that maximally leverage emerging circuit fabrics to enable whole new commercial/defense application areas.
• SONIC sets out to enable equivalent scaling in beyond-CMOS nanoscale fabrics by embracing their statistical attributes within statistical-inference-based applications, architectures and circuits to achieve unprecedented levels of robustness and energy efficiency.

Links to STARnet, as well as the SONIC and C-FAR research centers can be found below: