MIT Angstrom Project

The MIT-led Angstrom team will rethink computing and create a fundamentally new computing architecture to meet the challenges of extreme-scale computing. Project Angstrom’s goal is to create the fundamental technologies necessary for extreme-scale computers. Extreme-scale computers face several major challenges, the most difficult four being the energy efficiency challenge, the scalability challenge, the programmability challenge and the dependability challenge. We address these challenges from basic hardware/software research, to chip and system fabrication with a team that includes MIT's CSAIL, MTL, RLE, and MPhC labs; industry partners Freescale Semiconductor, Mercury Federal Systems and Lockheed ATL; and the University of Maryland Department of ECE. Angstrom is funded by the DARPA UHPC (Ubiquitous High-Performance Computing) program.

Project Angstrom’s vision to address the four major challenges of extreme-scale computing is based on two key foundations: creating a revolutionary SElf-awarE Computational model called SEEC, and a fully distributed factored architecture for both hardware and software.

Project Angstrom has been working toward designing computer hardware and software systems that will essentially act as 'brains' to coordinate computer components and to learn, thereby allowing them to optimize themselves to meet user-specified goals. Application heartbeats, released as open source by Project Angstrom team members a year ago, monitors how all the different applications in a multicore processor computing environment (from cell phones to supercomputers) are running and manages their behavior, including performance, power consumption and output quality. Future systems will not only be able to tell which individual components are not meeting their goals and need additional resources, but will learn from the experience, avoiding this kind of problem in the future -- or at least will fix it more efficiently.

Project Angstrom’s self-aware computing has been selected by the editors of Scientific American as one of "Ten World Changing Ideas" in the December 2011 issue. Project Angstrom is an MIT-led research consortium that is based in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and engages researchers from the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Microsystems Technology Laboratories and the Materials Processing Center, as well as several external collaborators from industry and academia.