Yu joins new computing technology center

Minlan Yu, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been named Assistant Director for the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing. Funded by a $31.5 million grant from the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0), the center will focus on advancing distributed computing, from cloud-based datacenters to edge nodes, so it operates with orders of magnitude more energy efficiency than today. In distributed computing, large amounts of data are processed by multiple computers or nodes spread across a network.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will lead the ACE Center, one of seven new multi-university research centers funded through JUMP 2.0, a public-private partnership led by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The center is co-sponsored by SRC, DARPA, the commercial semiconductor industry, and the defense industrial base.

ACE will be directed by Josep Torrellas, the Saburo Muroga Professor of Computer Science at UIUC, and includes faculty from the University of Illinois, Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, MIT, Ohio State, Purdue, Stanford, the University of California San Diego, the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan, The University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.