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.
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.
v1.0 released (Jan 11th, 2008)