Call Anant Agarwal’s work crazy, and you’ve made him a happy man.
Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. The lab is housed in the university’s Stata Center, a Dr. Seussian hodgepodge of forms and angles that nicely reflects the unhindered-by-reality visionary research that goes on inside.
Agarwal and his colleagues are figuring out how to build the computer chips of the future, looking a decade or two down the road. The aim is to do research that most people think is nuts. “If people say you’re not crazy,” Agarwal tells Wired, “that means you’re not thinking far out enough.”
Agarwal has been at this a while, and periodically, when some of his pie-in-the-sky research becomes merely cutting-edge, he dons his serial entrepreneur hat and launches the technology into the world. His latest commercial venture is Tilera. The company’s specialty is squeezing cores onto chips — lots of cores. A core is a processor, the part of a computer chip that runs software and crunches data. Today’s high-end computer chips have as many as 16 cores. But Tilera’s top-of-the-line chip has 100.
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