PPL News

What's new in PPL

Current News:

Members of PPL group receive Distinguished Paper Award at Euro-Par 2009

"A Case Study of Communication Optimizations on 3D Mesh Interconnects" by Abhinav Bhatele, Eric Bohm, and Laxmikant V. Kale of the Parallel Programming Laboratory (PPL) was picked as a Distinguished Paper at Euro-Par 2009. The paper was one of four that was given this honor during the August conference. Mr. Bhatele was on hand at the conference in Delft, The Netherlands, to present their research. The talk was well received with many interesting comments and questions.

The paper presents research on exploiting the topology of supercomputers to improve application performance. Performance improvements up to two times are presented in the paper. An API has been developed, which obtains topology information on 3D torus machines like IBM Blue Gene and Cray XT. Using the API and topology aware mapping, the object communication graph is embedded on the processor topology graph. The group is now working on automating techniques developed in this paper and adding them to the Charm++ runtime.

SC '09 Best Student Paper Finalist

David Kunzman's "Toward a Framework for Abstracting Accelerators in Parallel Applications: Experience with Cell" was picked as one of four finalists for the best student paper honor at SC '09. the paper is a result of Kunzman's thesis research, which is aimed at harnessing the power of future supercomputers consisting of a heterogeneous collection of accelerators, along with manycore and multicore chips. The winner will be announced during the conference in November, 2009. Please visit the SC'09 Technical papers website for more information.

PPLers receive CS Dept Awards (April 2009)

Two PPLers received awards from the Computer Science department for the 2008-2009 academic year. Edgar Solomonik received the Best Undergraduate Research Project Award and Abhinav Bhatele was awarded the David J. Kuck Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award. Congratulations to both!

PPL Releases Charm ++ 6.1

The Parallel Programming Lab in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has released the newest version of Charm ++. Charm 6.1 is now available for download here.

Charm++ is a parallel extension to C++ developed at PPL. It provides high-level mechanisms and strategies to facilitate the task of developing even highly complex parallel applications.

Prior Years News:

SC '08 Best Poster Award Goes to PPLer

Abhinav Bhatele, a Ph.D. student in PPL, was presented with the SC '08 Best Poster Award at the SC '08 conference (international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis) that took place in Austin, Texas in November of 2008.

Undergraduate Positions Available in PPL

There are several undergraduate positions available in the Parallel Progamming Lab. For more information, please view the Undergraduate Positions Available page.

PPLer is Awarded Best Paper at PADTAD

PPLer Filippo Gioachin's paper, Memory Tagging in Charm++, co-written with Prof. Kale, was awarded best paper at the Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging (PADTAD) '08, at the July 2008 workshop held in Seattle, Washington.

PPL participates in UPCRC

Prof. Kale and PPL are part of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC). UPCRC is a joint research effort of the Illinois department of computer science and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, with funding from corporate partners Microsoft and Intel. For more information, please visit the UPCRC website.

PPL is part of BlueWaters project

Prof. Kale and PPL participated in developing the successful proposal for the NSF's sustained-petaFLOPS "Track 1" system, named Blue Waters, which will be deployed at NCSA. Please click here for more information.

Positions available at PPL

There are several positions available in PPL. Please view the position information here.

PPL participates in IACAT project (Jan 2008)

Read the announcement here

v1.0 released (Jan 11th, 2008)

Go to OpenAtom's website

PPL among petascale leaders (Aug 2007)

PPL, a member of the Great Lakes Consortium, participates in the proposal selected by the National Science Board for petascale system

PPLer receives honorable mention by CRA (Dec 2007)

Ekaterina Gonina has received an honorable mention in CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards

PPLer becomes Siebel Scholar (Aug 2007)

Lukasz Wesolowski has been selected a 2007/2008 Siebel Scholar

ChaNGa 1.0 released (Feb 2007)

Go to ChaNGa's website.

PPL receives award from IBM (Dec 2006)

Read the announcement here.

NAMD picked by NSF as key petascale application (June 2006)

Read the recent NSF petascale-class solicitation.

Charm++ port to the Cell processor taking shape (June 2006)

A preliminary report is available in a Charm++ on Cell poster.

PPL members get CS-Dep. awards (April 2006)

See the list, including Sameer Kumar's best PhD thesis award.

Charm 5.9 release

The new Charm version is now available for download.

Faucets awarded NCSA Faculty Fellow Grant

Read the announcement here

New UIUC Apple G5 Cluster

Deployed by UIUC's CSE program, read more information

Isaac Dooley awarded a DOE-HPCSF Fellowship

Read more information about these prestigious awards