Motorola wins NCSA's Grand Challenge Award

Motorola Inc. won the 1995 Industrial Grand Challenge Award at the Seventh Annual Executive Meeting of NCSA's Industrial Partners in April 1995. The award recognizes Motorola for its use of leading- edge computing and advanced visualization technologies in the modeling and simulation of a new type of digital cellular telephone system using Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA).

The 1995 award specifically recognized the efforts of Gerald Labedz and his Motorola Advanced Cellular Products Group, Arlington Heights, IL. Their work involved simulation of both the cellular radio and system performance and was carried out using NCSA's parallel computing and support capabilities. During 1994, Thinking Machine's massively parallel Connection Machine Model 5 (CM-5) and NCSA support staff were used extensively to determine CDMA radio receiver's response to complex radio propagation environments found in a CDMA cellular system design. The work is being continued on another of NCSA's parallel supercomputers, the SGI POWER CHALLENGE.

Gerry Labedz and Maria Martinez, Motorola Advanced Cellular Products Group, accept 1995 Grand Challenge Awards from NCSA Director Larry Smarr (center). (Photo by Wilmer Zehr)

Working with NCSA

Motorola is using NCSA to help study both abstract, idealized systems and detailed physical models of actual cities in which CDMA systems are to be deployed to a level of detail considered impossible on even the best engineering workstations available. The simulations allow Motorola to gain valuable operational experience with the new CDMA systems. Effects that can only be observed in large-scale deployments can be observed using high- performance computing and visualization technologies, allowing Motorola to offer its customers a cellular network at a higher level of quality than previously.

Digital cellular radio technology transforms, or encodes, the human voice into digital bits of information transmitted to a receiver for decoding, or translation, into the human voice. CDMA is a digital coding technique that makes highly efficient use of the radio spectrum to provide significant capacity increases for operators and enhanced call quality for their customers.

Using NCSA's resources

"By using NCSA's facilities, we were able to build a complicated computer simulation of an entire CDMA cellular system and then predict exactly what that system would be like in the real world," Labedz says. "By having the computational capability to deal with large cities and thousands of cellular users, we can deliver to our customers a quality product in a shorter time."

According to Tony Hennen, corporate vice-president and general manager of Motorola's Advanced Cellular Products Group, "One of the reasons for establishing our relationship with NCSA and the University of Illinois in 1988 was to gain early access to high- performance computing technologies and knowledge. NCSA's leadership in massively parallel computing has helped enable Motorola to gain a leadership position in taking the CDMA digital standard from promise to reality."

An ongoing effort

"Earning the Grand Challenge Award began seven years ago when Motorola made the commitment to invest in high-performance computing and simulation technology transfer and then joined NCSA," says John Stevenson, NCSA's corporate officer and head of the Industrial Partners Program. "The company's commitment, combined with the personal initiative and drive of Gerry Labedz and his team, led to this significant achievement."

In 1992 NCSA established the Grand Challenge Award to recognize corporations that accomplish competitive breakthrough applications as a result of their NCSA partnerships. Previous winners were Lilly (1992), Caterpillar (1993), and FMC (1994). Part of NCSA's mission is to help improve the competitiveness of American industry.

Partner executives and NCSA staff convene at the Beckman Institute to discuss advancements in HPCC and their relationship to business strategies at the Seventh Annual Meeting of NCSA's Industrial Partners. (Photo by Wilmer Zehr)

access / Summer 1995 / NCSA