TCD amongst 10 worldwide universities to receive IBM Cell Broadband Engine Technology donation

Posted on: 14 December 2006

Trinity College’s Graphics, Vision and Visualisation Research Group has been selected as a winner of the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) award. TCD is amongst 10 universities worldwide and only two in Europe to win the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) technology donation. The donation will be used to research technology for human animation in the video game and movie industries.

Realistic animation of human motion is critical to the development of computer games and movies. The Graphics, Vision and Visualisation Group in the School of Computer Science and Statistics will be directed at the next generation of animation systems, and aims to develop intelligent and realistic simulations of human motion. This research will build upon IBM Cell technology developed on the Cell BE processor which has been designed to meet the demands of the growing media and entertainment industries.

In addition, TCD will also collaborate on these research projects with IBM’s Emerging Software Systems team based in IBM’s Watson Research Lab. This collaboration will build stronger ties between TCD and IBM researchers in Ireland and the US, allowing both parties to gain insights into emerging technologies, exchange market trend info, and accelerate innovation in the exiting area of digital media.

Commenting on the award Dr. Steven Collins, manager of TCD’s Graphics, Vision and Visualisation Research Group said: “We are delighted and extremely excited by this award and look forward to collaborating with IBM over the coming years. The Cell BE represents an ideal platform for investigating new technologies that will drive the future of media and entertainment, and this award provides a great infrastructure for our research and also for training and preparing graduate and postgraduate students for successful careers in these industries.”

IBM’s Bruce D’Amora, executive sponsor of the project stated:”All of these universities have very unique ideas on how they think Cell BE technology can be applied to help solve different problems, and encourage skill development among its students and faculty, and IBM is proud to be an enabler to help these universities make these innovation ideas possible.”

The Graphics, Vision and Visualisation research group in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, TCD, in collaboration with IBM Ireland and IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, also organised and hosted a workshop on the new Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor at the end of November. The Cell BE, developed by IBM in collaboration with Sony and Toshiba, is a revolutionary new processor featuring nine execution cores, and has been designed specifically to meet the needs of distributed processing and multimedia applications. The workshop was opened by the Provost, Dr John Hegarty, and featured keynote presentations from Bruce D’Amora, of IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, NY and Stephen Kennedy, a senior engineer and founding member of Havok, a TCD campus company. IBM’s Mr D’Amora and one of the world’s experts on the Cell BE discussed the future of the Cell BE and Visualisation while Havok’s Mr Kennedy outlined some of its experiences with the Cell processor and their development of physics and animation software tools for games developers on the Playstation®3.
The workshop also provided an opportunity for Irish researchers and engineers to get hands-on experience with the Cell processor during a one and a half day training session delivered by IBM US staff. The Cell processor is an important step forward for media and scientific applications and forms the basis of a planned stream of research being embarked upon by the Graphics, Vision and Visualisation group in Trinity College Dublin. The workshop was chaired by Dr. Steven Collins and Dr. David Gregg of the School of Computer Science and Statistics.

Background Information:

The cell technology, donated by IBM, will be used by Trinity College’s School of Computer Science and Statistics, the oldest and largest department of its type in Ireland, for a number of animation research and development projects. These projects will focus on the development of new technology and intellectual property that will contribute to the future of interactive entertainment and simulation and will include:
–  Development of a real-time massive city simulation, a virtual Dublin, with realistic population, traffic and associated urban noise. This will act as a platform for fundamental research into human motion simulation and motion perception, which will be important for developing future online interactive worlds and urban environmental simulations.
–  An investigation of new methods for photorealistic image generation in real-time to dramatically increase the level of realism possible in interactive games and simulations. These methods will help to bridge the gap between the graphics quality of games and movies.
–  Creation of a new language for real-time entertainment application development; this language will take advantage of the multiple processing cores in the Cell BE and expose the power of the processor to designers and artists while hiding the complexity of the hardware. This could significantly reduce the cost of video game development in the future.

These projects will be funded by research grants from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), The Higher Education Authority (HEA), the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET), and Enterprise Ireland.

The revolutionary Cell BE processor is a breakthrough design featuring a central processing core, based on IBM’s industry leading Power Architecture technology, and eight synergistic processors. Cell BE “supercharges” compute-intensive applications such as graphics, offering fast performance for computer entertainment and handhelds, virtual-reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows and other “image-hungry” computing environments.

The Cell BE processor appears in products such as Sony Computer Entertainment’s PLAYSTATION®3, Toshiba’s Cell Reference Set, a development tool for Cell products, and already is included in the IBM BladeCenter® QS20, or “Cell Blade,” as well as through joint collaboration with Mercury Computer Systems, Inc., targeted at aerospace and defense, semiconductor, medical imaging, and other markets.

IBM’s highly-selective SUR program awards computing equipment, software, and services globally to higher education institutions in order to facilitate research projects of mutual interest, including: the architecture of business and processes, real-time data analysis, privacy and security, supply chain management, information based medicine, deep computing, event-driven computing, and storage solutions.

The SUR awards also support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers in academia with IBM researchers, along with representatives from product development and solution provider communities. IBM supports approximately 50 SUR awards per year worldwide.

IBM Ireland, County Manager, Michael Daly, Provost Dr John Hegarty, IBM T.J Watson Research Centre’s Bruce D’Amora, TCD Graphics & Vision Research Group Manager Steve Collins