EECS Faculty Co-PI of a $39.5 Million Multi-University Research Project

Mohammad Alian, an assistant professor of the EECS Department, is a Co-PI of the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, a new center that will advance distributed computing technology from cloud-based data centers to edge nodes. The ACE Center is funded by a $31.5 million grant from the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0), with additional funding from partner institutions, totaling $39.6 million over five years.


“We need to distribute the computation over many processing elements, from cloud to edge, to meet the compute demand of future applications,” said Mohammad Alian. He added, “As a Co-PI in the ACE center, I will develop technologies to reduce data movement in cloud computing, which is the main performance and energy bottleneck in the future distributed systems.”

The ACE Center is led by Professor Josep Torrellas of UIUC, Professor Alian, and faculty researchers from UIUC, Cornell, Georgia Tech, MIT, Ohio State, Purdue, Stanford, the University of California San Diego, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.

The ACE Center will contribute to the national effort to strengthen the semiconductor industry and train a highly skilled workforce in this field. It will involve over a hundred graduate and undergraduate students, who will work closely with faculty and leading researchers in the industry. This large-scale collaboration will be unique in its ability to draw on the differing strengths of industry and academia. 

The JUMP 2.0 program is a public-private partnership led by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), in cooperation with DARPA, and is co-sponsored by SRC, DARPA, the commercial semiconductor industry, and the defense industrial base.