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CHECS News Archive
Green500 project expanding. The Green500 project is growing to better reflect the increased importance of power and energy issues in high-end computing. Co-founders Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron have announced that in addition to the primary TOP Green500 list, which ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world by energy efficiency, three new lists will be used to publicize and compare various efforts in green computing. The ‘Little Green500’ list will broaden the definition of a supercomputer to include any machine used for commodity supercomputing that could have made the TOP500 within the past 18 months. The 'Open Green500' will allow supercomputers to use a combination of single-precision and double-precision to generate a sufficiently accurate double-precision result for the LINPACK benchmark. And the 'HPCC Green500' will use the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark for its performance results. See the VT press release for more information.
MASCOTS 2009 best paper. Congratulations to PhD student Guanying Wang, whose paper “A Simulation Approach to Evaluating Design Decisions in MapReduce Setups” was recognized at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, held in September in London. Collaborators on the paper include Wang’s advisor, Dr. Ali Butt, as well as Prashant Pandey and Karan Gupta of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.
IEEE Cluster 2009. CHECS faculty members Wu Feng and Cal Ribbens are in New Orleans this week for the annual IEEE Cluster conference. Feng served as Workshops Chair for the conference, and was an invited panelists in two panel discussions. Ribbens co-organized the workshop on Parallel Programming on Accelerator Clusters (PPAC09).
NVIDIA Award. Wu Feng has received a Professor Partnership Program Award from NVIDIA. One of 38 awardees, Feng and his students are pursuing research on accelerating the performance of key biological applications on graphics processing units (GPUs).
NAE Symposium. Ali Butt has been selected to participate in the 15th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The prestigious forum brings together young engineers from around the country to discuss multi-disciplinary ways to solve important problems.
Green 500 list announced. The 5th edition of the Green500 list was announced this month. This project, which ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world according to their energy efficiency, is led by Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron.
IPDPS 2009. CHECS was again well represented at the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), held this year in Rome. CHECS students presented four accepted papers in the main conference. In addition, Wu Feng gave a keynote address at the Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters, and three additional CHECS projects were reported on in workshop papers.
Commencement Awards. CHECS graduate students received three of the five graduate student recognition awards at the spring Computer Science commencement reception. Ashwin Aji (advised by Wu Feng) and Jaishankar Sundararaman (advised by Godmar Back) were recognized as outstanding graduating MS students. Rhonda Phillips (advised by Layne Watson) received an award for outstanding graduating PhD student. Congratulations to all the recent graduates!
College awards. Ali Butt and Adrian Sandu were among those recognized at the annual College of Engineering faculty reception recently. Dr. Butt received an Outstanding New Assistant Professor award, while Dr. Sandu was named an Engineering Faculty Fellow.
NDSEG Fellowship. Congratulations to PhD candidate Tom Scogland who was recently awarded a prestigious three-year fellowship from the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship program through the American Society for Engineering Education.
Graduate student awards. Congratulations to PhD students Rhonda Phillips and Rajesh Sudarsan, recognized this week for their research accomplishments. Rhonda was one of the winners of the poster competition at the annual Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) Research Symposium. And Rajesh was awarded first place in the 2009 Paul E. Torgersen (College of Engineering) Graduate Student Research Excellence Award competition. Phillips is advised by Prof. Layne Watson and Sudarsan is advised by Prof. Cal Ribbens.
NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Godmar Back has earned a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his proposal entitled “Advanced Execution Environments for Next Generation Cloud Applications.” The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty. This award brings to six the number of current or former CAREER award winners among CHECS faculty. See the CS department website for more information.
Green IT. Kirk Cameron is the editor of a new column appearing in IEEE Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. The column will focus on research and trends in green information technology, encompassing everything from the supply side of IT design, to deployment and use, through retirement and recycling.
Best Undergraduate Student Poster Award at SC08. Congratulations to Gabriel Martinez on winning an ACM Best Undergraduate Student Poster Award at the SC08 conference. Gabriel presented his poster, "Characterizing and Optimizing Virtualization Overhead for Portable High-Performance Networking," at the 20th Supercomputing conference, held this week in Austin, TX, and attended by over 11,000 people. Gabriel's work was supervised by Prof. Wu Feng.
System G. CHECS faculty Srinidhi Varadarajan and Kirk Cameron announced a new 324 node, 2592 core, parallel cluster today. The new system, dubbed "System G" in homage to the System X cluster built at Virginia Tech in 2003 and in recognition of a focus on "Green" computing, was recently benchmarked at 22.80TF on the Linpack (top500) benchmark. The new cluster is the first supercomputer running over quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand (40Gbs) interconnect, and is outfitted with thousands of power and thermal sensors to facilitate research and development of high-end power-aware systems and applications, at unprecedented scale. CHECS PhD students Bharath Ramesh, Hari Pyla and Hung-Ching Chang led a team of student volunteers who supplied most of the manpower to build the cluster. For more details, see the VT press release.
CHECS at SC08. As usual, several CHECS faculty and students will be participating in the annual Supercomputing conference and show, held this year in Austin, TX. Henry Monti and Ali Butt are co-authors on a paper to be presented in the Petascale Data Storage Workshop. Wu Feng is co-author on two technical papers to be presented at the conference, one of which includes CHECS students Tom Scogland and Ganesh Narayanaswamy. Mehmet Belgin will be presenting a research poster, co-authored by Godmar Back and Cal Ribbens. And We Feng and Kirk Cameron will once again be leading a BOF on the Green500 list. If you want to get in touch with CHECS faculty or students, one good way is to leave a message at the Virginia Tech booth on the display floor.
IP-to-Market award. Congratulations to Wu Feng and PhD student Song Huang whose project, EcoDaemon, was recently named winner of the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) first annual Intellectual Property to Market (IP2M) competition.
VT Research Feature Articles. CHECS faculty are featured in two recent Virginia Tech publications highlighting research at the university. Adrian Sandu's work in algorithms and software for air-quality modeling is featured in the Summer 2008 issue of Virginia Tech Research magazine. And Wu Feng and other CHECS colleagues are the subject of a feature article in the College of Engineering's Engineering Now annual publication.
IBM Faculty Award. Professor Ali Butt has been awarded an IBM Faculty Award for his project "Towards Application-Tailored Cloud Computing: Tools & Techniques for Customizing MapReduce Systems".
CHECS building world's largest power-aware research cluster. We have recently taken delivery of the components necessary to assemble a new cluster dedicated to high-end computing systems research, with a particular emphasis on power-aware systems. The system consists of 324 Mac Pro towers, with each node containing dual quad core 2.8GHz Xeon processors for a total of 2,592 cores. The system interconnect is a quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand network, making this the first large-scale cluster to employ QDR. In addition to work in power-aware systems, the cluster will support a wide range of basic and applied high-end computing research, including projects in transparent distributed shared memory systems and high-performance distributed storage systems, and collaborations with computational scientists and engineers. The cluster is funded in part by significant support from NSF and from Virginia Tech's College of Engineering.
IBM Faculty Award. Professor Wu Feng was awarded an IBM Faculty Award for 2008, for a project in the arena of large-scale bioinformatics, as exemplified by the mpiBLAST project and recent parallel transformations to bioinformatics codes on emerging chip multiprocessing platforms such as the Cell and GPGPU. This is the second year in a row that Feng has been awarded one of these highly competitive grants.
ISC'08. CHECS had a strong presence at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC08) in Dresden, Germany, which was attended by nearly 1500 researchers from around the world. Professors Wu Feng and Joao Setubal and their respective Ph.D. students, Jeremy Archuleta and Andrew Warren, had their paper presented as part of the "Distinguished Paper Award" session on June 17. A formal award ceremony for the paper occurred on June 18. Along with Professor Kirk Cameron, Feng also hosted a Birds-of-a-Feather session on "The Green500 List: Past, Present, and Future" on June 18. Feng also served as one of five expert panelists on the "Is High-Performance Computing Going Green?" panel on June 20.
ISC'08 Distinguished Paper Award. Wu Feng and Jeremy Archuleta have an accepted paper, co-authored with an international team of collaborators, entitled "Distributed I/O with ParaMEDIC: Experiences with a Worldwide Supercomputer" that has been named recipient of the ISC'08 Distinguished Paper Award. The paper will be presented at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany on June 15-20, 2008.
NSF CAREER Award. Congratulations to Ali Butt on being awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The $400,000 award will support research on “A Scalable Hierarchical Framework for High-Performance Data Storage.” See this article on the CS department website for more information.
A team lead by Wu Feng was named winner of the SC07 Storage Challenge yesterday. The project, titled ParaMEDIC: Parallel Metadata Environment for Distributed I/O and Computing, also involved VT PhD student Jeremy Archuleta and collaborators Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Laboratory) and Heshan Lin (North Carolina State Univeristy). See this VT news article for more details.
Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Cal Ribbens are organizing a workshop on "Parallel Programming on Accelerator-Based Systems" (PPABS). Jose Moreira (IBM) serves as the third co-organizer of this workshop, to be held February 23 in Salt Lake City, in conjunction with the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'08). See the PPABS homepage for more details.
Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron and several CHECS students and postdocs are getting ready to announce the first version of a new ranking of supercomputers --- the Green500. The purpose of the Green500 List is to provide a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, and hopefully, shift the focus of supercomputer design to adopt a more energy-efficient and power-efficient approach. See this VT news article for more details.
CHECS at SC|07. If you are attending the Supercomputing conference and show next week in Reno, please stop by and say hello. Several CHECS affiliates will be spending time at the Virginia Tech booth (#2803), and Virginia Tech and CHECS are well represented throughout the conference program. For more details, see this news story or this summary of VT involvement at SC|07.
Wu Feng and PhD student Jeremy Archuleta participated in the recent Microsoft eScience Workshop in Chapel Hill, NC. Archuleta gave a presentation entitled "A Swiss-Army Knife for Parallel Sequence-Search in Biomedical Informatics." Feng made two presentations, one "Making a Case for a Green500 List" and the other describing "A Power-Aware Run-Time System for Datacenter Environments."
The annual run-up to SC is keeping people busy in CHECS these days. This year the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC07) is being held in Reno, NV, November 10-16. CHECS is working with VT Advanced Research Computing (VTARC) to prepare the Virginia Tech research exhibit. In addition, the SyNeRGy Lab is working hard to finalize their entry in the SC07 Storage Challenge. CHECS students selected as student volunteers for the conference include Song Huang, Dong Li, Rajesh Sudarsan and Joseph Turner. Congratulations to Jeremy Archuleta as well, whose attendance will be supported by an SC07 Broader Engagement grant.
CHECS recently hosted two distinguished researchers in high-end computing. Dr. Xiaodong Zhang (Ohio State University) presented a talk entitled "Exploiting Sequential Locality for Fast Disk Accesses" on October 11. Four days later Dr. Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee) visited Blacksburg and gave "An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future."
Dimitrios Nikolopoulos and Godmar Back have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) - Computer Systems Research (CSR) award of $300,000 for their project entitled "Virtualization Technologies for Application-Specific Operating Systems (VT ASOS)." For more details, see this article on the VT CS homepage.
CHECS faculty members Kirk Cameron and Dimitrios Nikolopoulos have recently been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) - Computer Systems Research (CSR) award of $350,000 for their research entitled "Thermal Conductors: Runtime software support for proactive heat management in advanced execution systems." For more details, see this article on the VT CS homepage.
CHECS is well represented at the 2007 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-07) being held this week in XiAn, China. Three papers by CHECS faculty and students are being presented at ICPP-07:
Wuchun Feng and his PhD student Jeremy Archuleta will be one of four finalists in the SC|07 Storage Challenge. The entry, in collaboration with Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Lab), is entitled "ParaMEDIC: Parallel Meta-data Environment for Distributed I/O and Computing." ParaMEDIC can accelerate the I/O in mpiBLAST by as much as 25-fold. For additional information, see the SC07 entry here.
Wuchun Feng and MS student Ganesh Narayanaswamy have a paper in the 15th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects (Hot Interconnects), taking place this week in Palo Alto, CA. The paper, co-authored with Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Lab), is titled "An Analysis of 10-Gigabit Ethernet Protocol Stacks in Multicore Environments."
Three CHECS faculty have been awarded IBM Faculty Awards for 2007. Kirk Cameron, Wuchun Feng and Dimitris Nikolopolous are each recipients of one of these competitive awards, open to researchers at leading universities worldwide and designed to foster collaboration between academia and IBM. For more details about these awards, see the VT news item.
PhD student Mehmet Belgin presented a paper at the 21st ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS07), held in Seattle, June 16-20. Co-authors on the paper were CHECS faculty members Godmar Back and Cal Ribbens.
CHECS Director Srinidhi Varadarajan reports that this is an exciting time for Evergrid, the company he co-founded and for which he serves as chief technology officer. Evergrid recently announced the Cluster Availability Management Suite (CAMS), a resource management system for high-productivity computing grid environments and the utility enterprise datacenter. CAMS is integrated with Evergrid's Availability Management Service (AvS) to provide checkpoint/resume capabilities for applications, including massively parallel distributed applications.
SCAPE Laboratory researchers have created a first-of-its-kind tool for profiling the temperature of source codes. Tempest is a "Temperature Estimator" that runs on any system with LMSensors installed and has been successfully tested on a number of x86, x86_64, PowerPC, multi-core, and multi-processor systems. Tempest provides a thermal profile of an application and correlates temperature data to source code. Tempest development was led by Hari K. Pyla and Prof. Kirk W. Cameron of SCAPE. For more information, see this news item on Tempest at the CS Department homepage.
Ph.D. student Filip Blagojevic and Dimitris Nikolopoulos, director of the Parallel Emerging Architectures Research Lab (PEARL), won the best paper award at the 12th ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), held in San Jose, CA March 14-17. The paper, titled “Dynamic Multigrain Parallelization on the Cell Broadband Engine," was selected among 22 papers accepted in the conference. The paper was co-authored with Alexandros Stamatakis (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Christos Antonopoulos (College of William and Mary).
CHECS students and faculty have had several opportunities in recent weeks to interact with researchers visiting from other universities. David Lowenthal (University of Georgia) visited CHECS on February 23 and presented his work in "High-Performance, Power-Aware Computing." On February 27 Xiaosong Ma (NC State) made the trip up to Blacksburg and gave a seminar on "Transparent and Efficient Parallel Processing for End Users of Scientific Data." Anand Sivasubramaniam (Penn State) visited on March 15, presenting a seminar on "Power Management for Server Disks." Finally, Alexandros Stamatakis (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) described his research on "Algorithmic and HPC Challenges for Large-Scale Phylogeny Reconstruction" in a March 30 seminar.
The SCAPE Lab has begun collaborating with IBM research to port the PBPI framework to BlueGene/L, the world's fastest supercomputer. PBPI is a freely available portable implementation of parallel Bayesian phylogenetic inference. PBPI estimates phylogenetic trees using MCMC-based Bayesian inference on distributed-memory computers. The code was developed by SCAPE director Kirk Cameron, postdoc Xizhou Feng, and collaborator Duncan Buell (University of South Carolina).
The 21st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) was extremely selective this year in its selection of research papers. A total of 109 papers were selected from among 419 submissions (26%) making the competition particularly keen. CHECS will be very well-represented at the conference (held March 26-30 in Long Beach, CA), accounting for four of the 109 papers to be published in the conference proceedings. The research reported in these papers is directed by three CHECS faculty members, Kirk Cameron, Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Srinidhi Varadarajan. Co-authors include PhD students Filip Blagojevic, Rong Ge and Joseph Ruscio. For more information on the four papers, see the CS Department's news item on IPDPS.
CHECS researchers are studying programming approaches and performance optimization for the Sony PlayStation3. The Cell Broadband Engine, the processor at the heart of the PS3, is a heterogeneous multicore architecture which offers interesting opportunities for exploiting dynamic multi-grain parallelism. Students from Dr. Dimitris Nikolopoulos's Parallel Emerging Architectures Research Lab (PEARL) have been working with a Cell simulator for about one year. In December they, along with members of Dr. Kirk Cameron's Scalable Performance Laboratory (SCAPE), got their hands on a new PS3 and begin porting and running two leading computational phylogenetics packages, RAxML and PBPI. RAxML infers phylogenetic trees using a rapid hill climbing search algorithm and the Maximum Likelihood method. The code was developed by researchers at EPFL in Switzerland and optimized for the Cell BE by Nikolopoulos and PhD student Filip Blagojevic. PBPI, developed by Cameron and postdoctoral student Dr. Xizhou Feng, infers phylogenetic trees using a Markov chain Monte Carlo based method. Both of these projects leverage novel models and runtime environments developed by the research groups of Nikolopoulos and Cameron, for exploiting multi-grain parallelism on accelerator-based parallel architectures.
The first CHECS 'mixer' of the semester was held on February 1. Over 40 students and faculty attended, attracted in part by a desire to discuss CHECS initiatives over the next few months, and in part by the promise of pizza. Cal Ribbens (CHECS Associate Director) gave an overview of the goals and status of the center as well as mentioning a large sample of current projects. Ribbens' ppt slides are available here.
CHECS was well-represented at the SC06 conference in Tampa in November. Over 25 faculty and students from Virginia Tech were in attendance, including six faculty and nine students from CHECS. In addition to presenting three papers and a poster, CHECS members helped staff the Virginia Tech booth on the showroom floor. Three CHECS graduate students served as student volunteers at the conference as well. And CHECS director Srinidhi Varadarajan stayed busy on the showroom floor, representing both VT and a startup he is involved with. Varadarajan is CTO and co-founder of Evergrid, a provider of high availability and resource management software that lets massively parallelized distributed applications run at near 100 percent reliability on high performance computing clusters. Varadarajan and his colleagues demonstrated several software technologies, including a new virtualization layer.
Wu Feng served as program co-chair for the 15th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCN06), held October 9-11 in Arlington, VA.
Dan Reed paid a visit to CHECS and the Computer Science Department on October 30. Dr. Reed is Chancellor's Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute. During his visit he gave a distinguished lecture titled "The Future: Release 2016."
Dimitris Nikolopoulos will serve as Program Vice-Chair for the 36th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-07), in the OS and Resource Management technical track. The conference will be held September 21-24, 2007 in XiAn, China.
CHECS continues to grow with the addition of Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Ali Butt. See this article for more information on these two new CS faculty members.
Naren Ramakrishnan, Cal Ribbens, and Srinidhi Varadarajan, along with Danesh Tafti of Mechanical Engineering, have recently been awarded $640,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Systems Research (CSR) grant titled "The Adaptive Code Kitchen: Flexible Tools for Dynamic Application Composition." This project will build upon the NSF CAREER grants of Ramakrishnan and Varadarajan to develop next generation programming tools for compositional construction of adaptive software systems.
CHECS faculty and students will present three papers at the SC06 conference in November. Click here for details.
The Computer Science Department has added two new faculty members this semester who will be strong contributors to CHECS, Wu-chun Feng and Eli Tilevich. See the CS Department news item for more details.
November 12, 2009
Green500 project expanding. The Green500 project is growing to better reflect the increased importance of power and energy issues in high-end computing. Co-founders Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron have announced that in addition to the primary TOP Green500 list, which ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world by energy efficiency, three new lists will be used to publicize and compare various efforts in green computing. The ‘Little Green500’ list will broaden the definition of a supercomputer to include any machine used for commodity supercomputing that could have made the TOP500 within the past 18 months. The 'Open Green500' will allow supercomputers to use a combination of single-precision and double-precision to generate a sufficiently accurate double-precision result for the LINPACK benchmark. And the 'HPCC Green500' will use the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark for its performance results. See the VT press release for more information.
October 4, 2009
MASCOTS 2009 best paper. Congratulations to PhD student Guanying Wang, whose paper “A Simulation Approach to Evaluating Design Decisions in MapReduce Setups” was recognized at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, held in September in London. Collaborators on the paper include Wang’s advisor, Dr. Ali Butt, as well as Prashant Pandey and Karan Gupta of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.
September 1, 2009
IEEE Cluster 2009. CHECS faculty members Wu Feng and Cal Ribbens are in New Orleans this week for the annual IEEE Cluster conference. Feng served as Workshops Chair for the conference, and was an invited panelists in two panel discussions. Ribbens co-organized the workshop on Parallel Programming on Accelerator Clusters (PPAC09).
August 27, 2009
NVIDIA Award. Wu Feng has received a Professor Partnership Program Award from NVIDIA. One of 38 awardees, Feng and his students are pursuing research on accelerating the performance of key biological applications on graphics processing units (GPUs).
July 3, 2009
NAE Symposium. Ali Butt has been selected to participate in the 15th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The prestigious forum brings together young engineers from around the country to discuss multi-disciplinary ways to solve important problems.
June 28, 2009
Green 500 list announced. The 5th edition of the Green500 list was announced this month. This project, which ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world according to their energy efficiency, is led by Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron.
June 3, 2009
IPDPS 2009. CHECS was again well represented at the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), held this year in Rome. CHECS students presented four accepted papers in the main conference. In addition, Wu Feng gave a keynote address at the Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters, and three additional CHECS projects were reported on in workshop papers.
May 15, 2009
Commencement Awards. CHECS graduate students received three of the five graduate student recognition awards at the spring Computer Science commencement reception. Ashwin Aji (advised by Wu Feng) and Jaishankar Sundararaman (advised by Godmar Back) were recognized as outstanding graduating MS students. Rhonda Phillips (advised by Layne Watson) received an award for outstanding graduating PhD student. Congratulations to all the recent graduates!
May 12, 2009
College awards. Ali Butt and Adrian Sandu were among those recognized at the annual College of Engineering faculty reception recently. Dr. Butt received an Outstanding New Assistant Professor award, while Dr. Sandu was named an Engineering Faculty Fellow.
April 20, 2009
NDSEG Fellowship. Congratulations to PhD candidate Tom Scogland who was recently awarded a prestigious three-year fellowship from the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship program through the American Society for Engineering Education.
April 4, 2009
Graduate student awards. Congratulations to PhD students Rhonda Phillips and Rajesh Sudarsan, recognized this week for their research accomplishments. Rhonda was one of the winners of the poster competition at the annual Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) Research Symposium. And Rajesh was awarded first place in the 2009 Paul E. Torgersen (College of Engineering) Graduate Student Research Excellence Award competition. Phillips is advised by Prof. Layne Watson and Sudarsan is advised by Prof. Cal Ribbens.
March 20, 2009
NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Godmar Back has earned a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his proposal entitled “Advanced Execution Environments for Next Generation Cloud Applications.” The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty. This award brings to six the number of current or former CAREER award winners among CHECS faculty. See the CS department website for more information.
February 3, 2009
Green IT. Kirk Cameron is the editor of a new column appearing in IEEE Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. The column will focus on research and trends in green information technology, encompassing everything from the supply side of IT design, to deployment and use, through retirement and recycling.
November 21, 2008
Best Undergraduate Student Poster Award at SC08. Congratulations to Gabriel Martinez on winning an ACM Best Undergraduate Student Poster Award at the SC08 conference. Gabriel presented his poster, "Characterizing and Optimizing Virtualization Overhead for Portable High-Performance Networking," at the 20th Supercomputing conference, held this week in Austin, TX, and attended by over 11,000 people. Gabriel's work was supervised by Prof. Wu Feng.
November 18, 2008
System G. CHECS faculty Srinidhi Varadarajan and Kirk Cameron announced a new 324 node, 2592 core, parallel cluster today. The new system, dubbed "System G" in homage to the System X cluster built at Virginia Tech in 2003 and in recognition of a focus on "Green" computing, was recently benchmarked at 22.80TF on the Linpack (top500) benchmark. The new cluster is the first supercomputer running over quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand (40Gbs) interconnect, and is outfitted with thousands of power and thermal sensors to facilitate research and development of high-end power-aware systems and applications, at unprecedented scale. CHECS PhD students Bharath Ramesh, Hari Pyla and Hung-Ching Chang led a team of student volunteers who supplied most of the manpower to build the cluster. For more details, see the VT press release.
November 16, 2008
CHECS at SC08. As usual, several CHECS faculty and students will be participating in the annual Supercomputing conference and show, held this year in Austin, TX. Henry Monti and Ali Butt are co-authors on a paper to be presented in the Petascale Data Storage Workshop. Wu Feng is co-author on two technical papers to be presented at the conference, one of which includes CHECS students Tom Scogland and Ganesh Narayanaswamy. Mehmet Belgin will be presenting a research poster, co-authored by Godmar Back and Cal Ribbens. And We Feng and Kirk Cameron will once again be leading a BOF on the Green500 list. If you want to get in touch with CHECS faculty or students, one good way is to leave a message at the Virginia Tech booth on the display floor.
October 14, 2008
IP-to-Market award. Congratulations to Wu Feng and PhD student Song Huang whose project, EcoDaemon, was recently named winner of the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) first annual Intellectual Property to Market (IP2M) competition.
October 9, 2008
VT Research Feature Articles. CHECS faculty are featured in two recent Virginia Tech publications highlighting research at the university. Adrian Sandu's work in algorithms and software for air-quality modeling is featured in the Summer 2008 issue of Virginia Tech Research magazine. And Wu Feng and other CHECS colleagues are the subject of a feature article in the College of Engineering's Engineering Now annual publication.
October 2, 2008
IBM Faculty Award. Professor Ali Butt has been awarded an IBM Faculty Award for his project "Towards Application-Tailored Cloud Computing: Tools & Techniques for Customizing MapReduce Systems".
July 21, 2008
CHECS building world's largest power-aware research cluster. We have recently taken delivery of the components necessary to assemble a new cluster dedicated to high-end computing systems research, with a particular emphasis on power-aware systems. The system consists of 324 Mac Pro towers, with each node containing dual quad core 2.8GHz Xeon processors for a total of 2,592 cores. The system interconnect is a quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand network, making this the first large-scale cluster to employ QDR. In addition to work in power-aware systems, the cluster will support a wide range of basic and applied high-end computing research, including projects in transparent distributed shared memory systems and high-performance distributed storage systems, and collaborations with computational scientists and engineers. The cluster is funded in part by significant support from NSF and from Virginia Tech's College of Engineering.
June 27, 2008
IBM Faculty Award. Professor Wu Feng was awarded an IBM Faculty Award for 2008, for a project in the arena of large-scale bioinformatics, as exemplified by the mpiBLAST project and recent parallel transformations to bioinformatics codes on emerging chip multiprocessing platforms such as the Cell and GPGPU. This is the second year in a row that Feng has been awarded one of these highly competitive grants.
June 24, 2008
ISC'08. CHECS had a strong presence at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC08) in Dresden, Germany, which was attended by nearly 1500 researchers from around the world. Professors Wu Feng and Joao Setubal and their respective Ph.D. students, Jeremy Archuleta and Andrew Warren, had their paper presented as part of the "Distinguished Paper Award" session on June 17. A formal award ceremony for the paper occurred on June 18. Along with Professor Kirk Cameron, Feng also hosted a Birds-of-a-Feather session on "The Green500 List: Past, Present, and Future" on June 18. Feng also served as one of five expert panelists on the "Is High-Performance Computing Going Green?" panel on June 20.
May 23, 2008
ISC'08 Distinguished Paper Award. Wu Feng and Jeremy Archuleta have an accepted paper, co-authored with an international team of collaborators, entitled "Distributed I/O with ParaMEDIC: Experiences with a Worldwide Supercomputer" that has been named recipient of the ISC'08 Distinguished Paper Award. The paper will be presented at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany on June 15-20, 2008.
January 23, 2008
NSF CAREER Award. Congratulations to Ali Butt on being awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The $400,000 award will support research on “A Scalable Hierarchical Framework for High-Performance Data Storage.” See this article on the CS department website for more information.
November 16, 2007
A team lead by Wu Feng was named winner of the SC07 Storage Challenge yesterday. The project, titled ParaMEDIC: Parallel Metadata Environment for Distributed I/O and Computing, also involved VT PhD student Jeremy Archuleta and collaborators Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Laboratory) and Heshan Lin (North Carolina State Univeristy). See this VT news article for more details.
November 10, 2007
Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Cal Ribbens are organizing a workshop on "Parallel Programming on Accelerator-Based Systems" (PPABS). Jose Moreira (IBM) serves as the third co-organizer of this workshop, to be held February 23 in Salt Lake City, in conjunction with the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'08). See the PPABS homepage for more details.
November 7, 2007
Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron and several CHECS students and postdocs are getting ready to announce the first version of a new ranking of supercomputers --- the Green500. The purpose of the Green500 List is to provide a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, and hopefully, shift the focus of supercomputer design to adopt a more energy-efficient and power-efficient approach. See this VT news article for more details.
November 5, 2007
CHECS at SC|07. If you are attending the Supercomputing conference and show next week in Reno, please stop by and say hello. Several CHECS affiliates will be spending time at the Virginia Tech booth (#2803), and Virginia Tech and CHECS are well represented throughout the conference program. For more details, see this news story or this summary of VT involvement at SC|07.
October 30, 2007
Wu Feng and PhD student Jeremy Archuleta participated in the recent Microsoft eScience Workshop in Chapel Hill, NC. Archuleta gave a presentation entitled "A Swiss-Army Knife for Parallel Sequence-Search in Biomedical Informatics." Feng made two presentations, one "Making a Case for a Green500 List" and the other describing "A Power-Aware Run-Time System for Datacenter Environments."
October 26, 2007
The annual run-up to SC is keeping people busy in CHECS these days. This year the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC07) is being held in Reno, NV, November 10-16. CHECS is working with VT Advanced Research Computing (VTARC) to prepare the Virginia Tech research exhibit. In addition, the SyNeRGy Lab is working hard to finalize their entry in the SC07 Storage Challenge. CHECS students selected as student volunteers for the conference include Song Huang, Dong Li, Rajesh Sudarsan and Joseph Turner. Congratulations to Jeremy Archuleta as well, whose attendance will be supported by an SC07 Broader Engagement grant.
October 19, 2007
CHECS recently hosted two distinguished researchers in high-end computing. Dr. Xiaodong Zhang (Ohio State University) presented a talk entitled "Exploiting Sequential Locality for Fast Disk Accesses" on October 11. Four days later Dr. Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee) visited Blacksburg and gave "An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future."
September 19, 2007
Dimitrios Nikolopoulos and Godmar Back have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) - Computer Systems Research (CSR) award of $300,000 for their project entitled "Virtualization Technologies for Application-Specific Operating Systems (VT ASOS)." For more details, see this article on the VT CS homepage.
September 17, 2007
CHECS faculty members Kirk Cameron and Dimitrios Nikolopoulos have recently been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) - Computer Systems Research (CSR) award of $350,000 for their research entitled "Thermal Conductors: Runtime software support for proactive heat management in advanced execution systems." For more details, see this article on the VT CS homepage.
September 10, 2007
CHECS is well represented at the 2007 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-07) being held this week in XiAn, China. Three papers by CHECS faculty and students are being presented at ICPP-07:
- "Tempest: A portable tool to identify hot spots in parallel code," Kirk W. Cameron, Hari K. Pyla, Srinidhi Varadarajan
- "CPU MISER: A Performance-Directed, Run-Time System for Power-Aware Clusters," Rong Ge, Xizhou Feng, Wu-chun Feng and Kirk Cameron
- "ReSHAPE: A Framework for Dynamic Resizing and Scheduling of Homogeneous Applications in a Parallel Environment," Rajesh Sudarsan and Calvin J. Ribbens
August 29, 2007
Wuchun Feng and his PhD student Jeremy Archuleta will be one of four finalists in the SC|07 Storage Challenge. The entry, in collaboration with Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Lab), is entitled "ParaMEDIC: Parallel Meta-data Environment for Distributed I/O and Computing." ParaMEDIC can accelerate the I/O in mpiBLAST by as much as 25-fold. For additional information, see the SC07 entry here.
August 22, 2007
Wuchun Feng and MS student Ganesh Narayanaswamy have a paper in the 15th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects (Hot Interconnects), taking place this week in Palo Alto, CA. The paper, co-authored with Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Lab), is titled "An Analysis of 10-Gigabit Ethernet Protocol Stacks in Multicore Environments."
July 16, 2007
Three CHECS faculty have been awarded IBM Faculty Awards for 2007. Kirk Cameron, Wuchun Feng and Dimitris Nikolopolous are each recipients of one of these competitive awards, open to researchers at leading universities worldwide and designed to foster collaboration between academia and IBM. For more details about these awards, see the VT news item.
June 23, 2007
PhD student Mehmet Belgin presented a paper at the 21st ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS07), held in Seattle, June 16-20. Co-authors on the paper were CHECS faculty members Godmar Back and Cal Ribbens.
June 15, 2007
CHECS Director Srinidhi Varadarajan reports that this is an exciting time for Evergrid, the company he co-founded and for which he serves as chief technology officer. Evergrid recently announced the Cluster Availability Management Suite (CAMS), a resource management system for high-productivity computing grid environments and the utility enterprise datacenter. CAMS is integrated with Evergrid's Availability Management Service (AvS) to provide checkpoint/resume capabilities for applications, including massively parallel distributed applications.
May 22, 2007
SCAPE Laboratory researchers have created a first-of-its-kind tool for profiling the temperature of source codes. Tempest is a "Temperature Estimator" that runs on any system with LMSensors installed and has been successfully tested on a number of x86, x86_64, PowerPC, multi-core, and multi-processor systems. Tempest provides a thermal profile of an application and correlates temperature data to source code. Tempest development was led by Hari K. Pyla and Prof. Kirk W. Cameron of SCAPE. For more information, see this news item on Tempest at the CS Department homepage.
March 28, 2007
Ph.D. student Filip Blagojevic and Dimitris Nikolopoulos, director of the Parallel Emerging Architectures Research Lab (PEARL), won the best paper award at the 12th ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), held in San Jose, CA March 14-17. The paper, titled “Dynamic Multigrain Parallelization on the Cell Broadband Engine," was selected among 22 papers accepted in the conference. The paper was co-authored with Alexandros Stamatakis (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Christos Antonopoulos (College of William and Mary).
March 24, 2007
CHECS students and faculty have had several opportunities in recent weeks to interact with researchers visiting from other universities. David Lowenthal (University of Georgia) visited CHECS on February 23 and presented his work in "High-Performance, Power-Aware Computing." On February 27 Xiaosong Ma (NC State) made the trip up to Blacksburg and gave a seminar on "Transparent and Efficient Parallel Processing for End Users of Scientific Data." Anand Sivasubramaniam (Penn State) visited on March 15, presenting a seminar on "Power Management for Server Disks." Finally, Alexandros Stamatakis (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) described his research on "Algorithmic and HPC Challenges for Large-Scale Phylogeny Reconstruction" in a March 30 seminar.
March 6, 2007
The SCAPE Lab has begun collaborating with IBM research to port the PBPI framework to BlueGene/L, the world's fastest supercomputer. PBPI is a freely available portable implementation of parallel Bayesian phylogenetic inference. PBPI estimates phylogenetic trees using MCMC-based Bayesian inference on distributed-memory computers. The code was developed by SCAPE director Kirk Cameron, postdoc Xizhou Feng, and collaborator Duncan Buell (University of South Carolina).
March 2, 2007
The 21st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) was extremely selective this year in its selection of research papers. A total of 109 papers were selected from among 419 submissions (26%) making the competition particularly keen. CHECS will be very well-represented at the conference (held March 26-30 in Long Beach, CA), accounting for four of the 109 papers to be published in the conference proceedings. The research reported in these papers is directed by three CHECS faculty members, Kirk Cameron, Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Srinidhi Varadarajan. Co-authors include PhD students Filip Blagojevic, Rong Ge and Joseph Ruscio. For more information on the four papers, see the CS Department's news item on IPDPS.
February 16, 2007
CHECS researchers are studying programming approaches and performance optimization for the Sony PlayStation3. The Cell Broadband Engine, the processor at the heart of the PS3, is a heterogeneous multicore architecture which offers interesting opportunities for exploiting dynamic multi-grain parallelism. Students from Dr. Dimitris Nikolopoulos's Parallel Emerging Architectures Research Lab (PEARL) have been working with a Cell simulator for about one year. In December they, along with members of Dr. Kirk Cameron's Scalable Performance Laboratory (SCAPE), got their hands on a new PS3 and begin porting and running two leading computational phylogenetics packages, RAxML and PBPI. RAxML infers phylogenetic trees using a rapid hill climbing search algorithm and the Maximum Likelihood method. The code was developed by researchers at EPFL in Switzerland and optimized for the Cell BE by Nikolopoulos and PhD student Filip Blagojevic. PBPI, developed by Cameron and postdoctoral student Dr. Xizhou Feng, infers phylogenetic trees using a Markov chain Monte Carlo based method. Both of these projects leverage novel models and runtime environments developed by the research groups of Nikolopoulos and Cameron, for exploiting multi-grain parallelism on accelerator-based parallel architectures.
February 5, 2007
The first CHECS 'mixer' of the semester was held on February 1. Over 40 students and faculty attended, attracted in part by a desire to discuss CHECS initiatives over the next few months, and in part by the promise of pizza. Cal Ribbens (CHECS Associate Director) gave an overview of the goals and status of the center as well as mentioning a large sample of current projects. Ribbens' ppt slides are available here.
December 1, 2006
CHECS was well-represented at the SC06 conference in Tampa in November. Over 25 faculty and students from Virginia Tech were in attendance, including six faculty and nine students from CHECS. In addition to presenting three papers and a poster, CHECS members helped staff the Virginia Tech booth on the showroom floor. Three CHECS graduate students served as student volunteers at the conference as well. And CHECS director Srinidhi Varadarajan stayed busy on the showroom floor, representing both VT and a startup he is involved with. Varadarajan is CTO and co-founder of Evergrid, a provider of high availability and resource management software that lets massively parallelized distributed applications run at near 100 percent reliability on high performance computing clusters. Varadarajan and his colleagues demonstrated several software technologies, including a new virtualization layer.
October 30, 2006
Wu Feng served as program co-chair for the 15th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCN06), held October 9-11 in Arlington, VA.
October 30, 2006
Dan Reed paid a visit to CHECS and the Computer Science Department on October 30. Dr. Reed is Chancellor's Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute. During his visit he gave a distinguished lecture titled "The Future: Release 2016."
September 21, 2006
Dimitris Nikolopoulos will serve as Program Vice-Chair for the 36th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-07), in the OS and Resource Management technical track. The conference will be held September 21-24, 2007 in XiAn, China.
September 4, 2006
CHECS continues to grow with the addition of Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Ali Butt. See this article for more information on these two new CS faculty members.
August 28, 2006
Naren Ramakrishnan, Cal Ribbens, and Srinidhi Varadarajan, along with Danesh Tafti of Mechanical Engineering, have recently been awarded $640,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Systems Research (CSR) grant titled "The Adaptive Code Kitchen: Flexible Tools for Dynamic Application Composition." This project will build upon the NSF CAREER grants of Ramakrishnan and Varadarajan to develop next generation programming tools for compositional construction of adaptive software systems.
July 25, 2006
CHECS faculty and students will present three papers at the SC06 conference in November. Click here for details.
January 16, 2006
The Computer Science Department has added two new faculty members this semester who will be strong contributors to CHECS, Wu-chun Feng and Eli Tilevich. See the CS Department news item for more details.
© 2006 Virginia Tech