The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Hardware / Architecture, Networks / Operating Systems, Numerical/Scientific Computing / HPC / Data-Intensive Scalable Computing

Research Interests:

The current research of the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) group is focused on reducing data access delay and enhancing fault-tolerant computing. Modern High-End Computing (HEC) systems become unprecedented fast in terms of CPU speed and unprecedented large in terms of system ensemble size. However, the technology advance is biased and unbalanced. The fast in CPU speed is worsen the memory-wall problem and the increasing in ensemble size makes fault-tolerant vital of HEC. We have proposed a new I/O architecture for HEC. Unlike traditional I/O, our architecture is based on a novel “Server-Push” model where a data access server, called File Access Server (FAS), proactively “pushes” data in time from a file server to the compute node’s memory. Here the “pushes” includes both “push up” (read) and “push down” (write). This concept is applicable to cache and memory data access as well. In fault tolerance, we combine the merits of both the newly emerged proactive fault tolerant approach and the traditional checkpointing approach to develop the FENCE (Fault awareness ENabled Computing Environment) environment. The SCS group currently has four NSF supported projects, two DoE supported projects, and one industry supported project in the about research areas. These research projects are in collaboration with the Argonne National Laboratory and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and are partially carried in the two national laboratories. Prof. Xian-He Sun is the director of the SCS laboratory, and a guest faculty of Argonne and Fermi laboratory. More information regarding the SCS laboratory can be found at www.cs.iit.edu/~scs/.

Contact Information:

Email: email obfuscated - click to reveal
Phone: 1-312-567-5260