Research Summary
Research in the area of advanced computer architecture has been primarily focused on how to improve the performance of computers in order to solve computationally intensive problems and support the emerging networking and commercial applications. Parallel processing is at the heart of such powerful computers.
The Parallel Processing Research Laboratory carries out research in the main areas of parallel and distributed processing, network-based high-performance computing, power-aware high-performance computing, and advanced computer architecture. We are interested in the various innovative techniques that could be effectively used at different layers to enhance the performance, and/or to minimize the power/energy consumption in high-performance parallel computing systems. Our research, in part, seeks to propose, design and evaluate innovative techniques for high-performance communication subsystems and runtime systems for high-performance clusters and data centers. We are interested in research along several directions related to InfiniBand, iWARP Ethernet and other RDMA-enabled interconnects, and the design and development of user-level and high-level communication and programming layers to support efficient execution and development of parallel applications. In addition, with the increasing amount of power/energy consumption in high-performance computing and data centers, our research is, in part, concerned with proposing novel ideas to reduce power consumption and improve energy efficiency with little or no impact on performance. Workload characterization of scientific, engineering and commercial applications as well as benchmarking and performance evaluation of parallel programming paradigms and high-performance computing systems is an integral part of our research.