HPCwire: NSF Supports New Distributed Computing Paradigm

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

February 03, 2009

NSF Supports New Distributed Computing Paradigm

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Feb. 3 -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded Louisiana State University professor Tevfik Kosar with the prestigious CAREER Award for the development of a new computing paradigm called "Data-aware Distributed Computing" over the next five years.

As applications and experiments in all areas of science are becoming increasingly complex and more demanding in terms of their computational and data requirements, some applications generate data volumes reaching hundreds of terabytes. Sharing, disseminating, and analyzing these large data sets becomes a big challenge, especially when distributed resources are used. The traditional distributed computing systems closely couple data handling and computation. They consider data resources as second class entities, and access to data as a side effect of computation. This makes the remote access and retrieval of data the main bottleneck in the end-to-end performance, reliability and automation of large-scale data-intensive and dynamic data-driven applications.

Kosar's proposed "Data-aware distributed computing" paradigm makes a distinctive contribution to distributed computing research because it focuses on planning, scheduling, monitoring and management of data movement tasks and data resources. Unlike existing approaches, Kosar's approach treats data resources and the tasks related to data access and movement as first class entities just like computational resources and compute tasks, and not simply the side effect of computation.

Kosar, who holds a joint faculty appointment with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, proposed a project titled "Data-aware Distributed Computing for Enabling Large-scale Collaborative Science." NSF will fund this project for five years at $400K.

The NSF CAREER Award is the foundation's most prestigious award for junior faculty members. It is part of NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program, which "recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century." CAREER Award recipients are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the missions of their institutions.

Through his work on the CAREER grant, Kosar will develop new computing systems that manage data more effectively with automated processes, which enables scientists to spend more time focusing on their research questions and less time dealing with data.

Kosar will perform research and development on data-aware schedulers which will provide capabilities such as planning, scheduling, resource reservation, job execution, and error recovery for data movement tasks; as well as integration of these capabilities to the other layers in distributed computing such as workflow planning, resource brokering, and storage management.

"This project will not only impact computer science research by changing the way computing is performed, but it will also dramatically change how domain scientists perform their research by facilitating rapid analysis and sharing of raw data and results," Kosar said. "It will help the scientists start thinking about totally new scenarios where simulations are closely coupled with large amounts of observational and experimental data, which would revolutionize science, not just in the new scenarios but in the way it will bring the computational, theoretical, and experimental scientists together which currently live in very different communities and do not interact."

Kosar's integrated career plan is expected to impact all traditionally compute intensive disciplines from science and engineering, as well as new emerging computational areas in the arts, humanities, business and education which need to deal with increasingly large amounts of data.

This project also involves education and outreach, as Kosar plans to let undergraduate and graduate students work alongside him in his research. Kosar will incorporate the project into the University's summer camp and outreach programs to students in the K-12 grades, and he plans to visit with students in Louisiana schools to discuss the project and encourage them to pursue careers in computational science and research.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html