Research Resource Discovery

Scientific application of Parallel Programming Lab-Cosmological simulation framework "ChaNGa"

Our research focuses on the computational foundations of intelligent behavior. We develop theories and systems pertaining to intelligent behavior using a unified methodology -- at the heart of which is the idea that learning has a central role in intelligence.

Our group's research focus is in computer architecture, but we take a full system view of the problems we solve and collaborate closely with faculty and students from other areas, including applications, software, and hardware. The field of computer architecture is currently undergoing several disruptive changes. Moore's law continues to bestow a wealth of transistors, but converting them into usable performance will require exploiting increasingly higher levels of parallelism or many-core computing. Designing parallel hardware and software that achieve power-efficient, reliable, and scalable performance, however, remains a challenge. We are currently working on the following projects to address this challenge:

Research groups in various topics

With an increasingly urbanized and mobile population, the likelihood of a worldwide pandemic is increasing. With rising input sizes and strict deadlines for simulation results, e.g., for real-time planning during the outbreak of an epidemic, we must expand the use of high performance computing (HPC) approaches and, in particular, push the boundaries of scalability for this application area. EpiSimdemics simulates epidemic diffusion in extremely large and realistic social contact networks. It captures dynamics among co-evolving entities. Such applications typically involve large-scale, irregular graph processing, which makes them difficult to scale due to irregular communication, load imbalance, and the evolutionary nature of their workload.

The Faucets project was carried out in the context of grids in early-mid 2000s. Some of the research that we carried out under Faucets projects is becoming increasingly relevant today. E.g. malleable jobs and market-driven pricing are gaining importance in HPC in cloud scenarios.

The goal of our research is to evaluate HPC performance in cloud, identify performance bottlenecks, and address them through HPC-aware cloud schedulers and cloud-aware parallel runtime system. With its adaptivity features, Charm++ is naturally suited for deployment in cloud infrastructures.

The Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center's mission is advancing the state of the art in parallel architectures, software, and applications, in order to provide technical results and insights useful in the areas of energy/power-efficient and easy to program portable devices. The research being done at the University of Illinois, with support from Intel, spans multiple research areas is organized around three key projects: Acrobatics, AvaScholar, and SafeSpeed.

LeanMD is a molecular dynamics simulation application written in Charm++ and Structured Dagger for PetaFLOPs class supercomputers. It is being developed as the next generation of NAMD, one of the parallel applications winning the Gordon Bell Award in SC2002.

Research in the MONET research group focuses on system software issues to provide services and protocols for end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for distributed multimedia applications, leveraging the best effort services provided by the underlying operating system and networks. Toward this goal, we are doing research in a broad area including (but not limited to): Multimedia operating systems Multimedia communication protocols QoS middleware and large scale distributed systems Multimedia security and trustworthy computing systems Advanced tele-immersive and multimedia applications High speed QoS routing and ad hoc networks

NAMD is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Prof. Kale, computer science Prof. Robert D. Skeel, and physics Prof. Klaus J. Schulten at the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG) of Beckman Institute. NAMD is a parallel, object-oriented molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. NAMD is distributed free of charge and includes source code. Charm++, developed by Prof. Kale and co-workers, simplifies parallel programming and provides automatic load balancing, which was crucial to the performance of NAMD

Many important problems in material science, chemistry, solid-state physics, and biophysics require a modeling approach based on fundamental quantum mechanical principles. A particular approach that has proven to be relatively efficient and useful is Car-Parrinello ab initio molecular dynamics (CPAIMD). Parallelization of this approach beyond a few hundred processors is challenging, due to the complex dependencies among various subcomputations, which lead to complex communication optimization and load balancing problems. We are parallelizing CPAIMD using Charm++. The computation is modeled using a large number of virtual processors, which are mapped flexibly to available processors with assistance from the Charm++ runtime system.

Our goal is to develop technology that improves performance of parallel applications while also improving programmer productivity. We aim to reach a point where, with our freely distributed software base, complex irregular and dynamic applications can (a) be developed quickly and (b) perform scalably on machines with thousands of processors. Processor virtualization is one of our core techniques: the programmer divides the computation into a large number of entities, which are mapped to the available processors by an intelligent runtime system. This separation of concerns between programmers and the system is key to attaining both our goals together.

POSE is an environment for parallel discrete event simulation comprised of an object-oriented language for modelling complex discrete event systems, new adaptive speculative (optimistic) synchronization strategies, communication libraries tuned to PDES behaviors and load balancers. Adaptive synchronization strategies adapt to the behavior of individual simulation entities without the need for strategy switching mechanisms.

Architecture, Compilers, and Parallel Computing Artificial Intelligence Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Database and Information Systems Graphics, Visualization, and HCI Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering Scientific Computing Systems and Networking Theory and Algorithms Corporate Collaborations

The i-acoma Architecture Group, led by Professor Josep Torrellas, focuses on new processor, memory, and system technologies and organizations to build novel multiprocessor computer architectures.