In partnership with Intel Corporation, NSF announced the first InTrans award of $3 million to a team of researchers led by Professor Jason Cong who are designing customizable, domain-specific computing technologies for use in healthcare. The work could lead to less exposure to dangerous radiation during x-rays by speeding up the computing side of medicine. It also could result in patient-specific cancer treatments. Led by University of California, Los Angeles, the research team includes experts in computer science and engineering, electrical engineering and medicine from Rice University and Oregon Health and Science University. The team comes mainly from the Center of Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC), which was supported by an NSF Expeditions in Computing Award in 2009.
In the project, the researchers looked beyond parallelization (the process of working on a problem with more than one processor at the same time) and instead focused on domain-specific customization, a disruptive technology with the potential to bring orders-of-magnitude improvements to important applications. Domain-specific computing systems work efficiently on specific problems - in this case, medical imaging and DNA sequencing of tumors - or a set of problems with similar features, reducing the time to solution and bringing down costs.The InTrans program not only advances important fundamental research and integrates it into industry, it also benefits society by improving medical imaging technologies and cancer treatments, helping to extend lives.
For details, please see NSF and UCLA press releases:
Taking great ideas from the lab to the fab
First NSF InTrans Grant Awarded to UCLA