Multicore Computational Center
Multicore Computational Center
As I sit here composing this 5th Year Director’s Blog for the period July 1st thru Sept. 30th, 2008, I am reminded that we celebrated our 1st year MC2 anniversary July 9th, 2008 when we were selected by IBM for this exceptional award to establish our Multicore Computational Center of Excellence. Like a child learning to take its first steps, we too had our ups and downs as we started to implement our plans. Fortunately, we had quite a few more ups than downs as we struggled to bring our computer configuration into a reliable operational status.
Before starting to list all our research thrusts and other accomplishments this quarter, I would like to point out that our permanent MC2 staff has grown considerably, from that which we originally proposed. We have grown from 4 graduate Research Assistants to where today we have 6 graduate Research Assistants with another to join us in January. We have also brought on 3 undergraduates assistants. In addition, besides my Associate Director, Prof. Yelena Yesha and myself, we have added two Associate Research Professors, John Dorband and Shujia Zhou to our faculty staff. Both are recognized experts in the field of high performance computing and we are fortunate to have them accept appointments with the MC2. I would also like to welcome our 2 new RAs, Charles Lohr and Josiah Hosie as well as our 3 undergraduate assistants, Brad Mancuso, Terrin Celestin and Obinna Uzoma. Much of this growth has been afforded by our success in obtaining competitive grants to supplement our IBM funding source, as originally indicated in our proposal to IBM to obtain self sustaining status in 3 years. We have quite a ways to go yet, but we are making good progress towards that goal.
The following indicates some example of the progress towards establishing our goal of sustainability:
• We were awarded in late August of this year with a planning grant from NSF to establish an Industry/University Collaborative Research Center for Multicore Productivity Research. In this endeavor, we are teamed with C0-I sites at Georgia Tech, University of California, San Diego and University of Minnesota, all well recognized centers for High Performance Computing.
• We submitted a Cloud Computing proposal to NSF which is still pending.
• We jointly submitted a proposal with Bartron Medical Imaging to TEDCO, a Maryland State office for the advancement of entrepreneurial efforts in IT.
• Successfully awarded a 2nd year proposal extension from the Laboratory of Telecommunication Sciences for research on Suffix Arrays.
• Obtained funding from the U/MD Medical School for providing video streaming images for the surgical training.
In addition to these efforts, this quarter the staff of MC2 had numerous papers accepted for publication in the following peer reviewed journals and proceedings and presentations at national and international conferences:
• A paper to appear titled “Service Oriented Atmospheric Radiances (SOAR): Gridding and Analysis Services for Multi Satellite IR Radiances for Climate Studies” in the Transactions of Geosciences and Remote Sensing.
• Two papers in the Proceedings of the International Geosciences and Remote Sensing Symposium 2008 Boston, Mass.
• A paper in the Network and Electronic Commission for Business Intelligence
• An Invited paper to the special issue of the Business Intelligence Journal
• Submitted 3 papers to the American Geophysical Union.
• Chairing session on Emerging Multicore Computing for Earth and Space Science. Received 17 papers and selected 8 for presentations and 8 for poster sessions.
• An award to Ms. Phuong Nguyen for the best student paper at the AGU conference in May with a certificate to be issued at the next general conference in December at the AGU conference in San Francisco.
A major accomplishment this quarter was fabulously successful convening of our first workshop on ‘Frontiers of Multicore Computing’. With a rather limited announcement and short notice in mid summer, we received 138 registrations with a maximum attendance of ~ 100 at one of the sessions. Represented were 17 universities, 9 government agencies and 12 industry corporations. Also at the workshop was an exhibit area by the following 5 industry partners: Gedae, Mentor Graphics, Rapid Mind, BMI, and IBM Austin. Featured speakers were Andy White, Project Manager for the IBM Roadrunner, Ram Rajamony, IBM Manager for Exaflop Computing, Dr. Tom Streling, LSU ‘On Entering the Petaflop Era’, Prof. G. Rochon, Purdue on ‘A Virtual Terrestrial Observatory’ and W.Lundgren, Gedae on ‘Programming Models for the Cell B.E’. Moreover, more than an additional 15 papers and a panel session were presented. This workshop was so successful that we are considering an International workshop next year.
Prof. Halem presented his ideas for a Think Big UMBC proposal to IBM calling for a mini Roadrunner to support an Academic Center for Data Analysis. Prof. Yesha also attended a meeting at IBM/RTP to coordinate a virtual computing project with NCSU utilizing the MC2 Cell cluster and met with IBM CAS director at Toronto to initiate collaboration on cloud computing. Dr. Halem also provided an overview of the MC2 to Northrop Grumman, the ITL manager of NIST and is scheduled for a presentation to the CTO at Raytheon IT and Essex Corp later this month.
David Chapman of MC2 has made substantial progress on implementing the Google MapReduce parallel cloud computing infrastructure on the cell cluster that operates on all 200 SPUs. Srini Kannan has implemented the RHSEG algorithm for medical imaging on the PPUs of the Cell cluster. S. Zhou is working with P. Ma of JHU and has started to make substantial progress on compiling the WRF Chem model on the Cell cluster.
This year two computational science courses will be offered in the UMBC/CSEE department in the Spring session. The courses are parallel Computing for the Cell B.E. cluster and Introduction to Scientific Supercomputing. These courses will be taught by Prof’s. J, Dorband and S. Zhou, respectively. It should also be noted that the Service Oriented Computing course taught by Prof. M. Halem had a registration of 17 students this year. This is indicative of the trend towards computational science as a growing computer science emphasis at UMBC.
The MC2 has submitted several new projects to IBM for consideration in its 2nd year budget. These projects include not only research in areas of climate study, aeronauics, and cloud computing but research into digital media assured information sharing and molecular chemistry. If approved, this would substantially expand the scope of research at the MC2.
Sincerely,
Milt Halem, Director