Charm++ Tutorial Presented at Chinese Academy of Sciences
Several members of the Parallel Programming Laboratory were in Beijing in December of 2010 to teach a Charm++ workshop at the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This tutorial was 3 days long, and included remote presentations as well as on-site talks and hands-on learning. The workshop was attended by the vice president of the Academy, Dr. Weibo Dai, the president of the supercomputing laboratory, Dr. Xuebin Chi, and other Academy staff researchers and scientists. This group is interested in using Charm++ to develop applications, along with other uses such as performance tuning and topology-aware mapping in infiniband. PPL members that led the tutorial included Dr. Gengbin Zheng, Eric Bohm, Chao Mei, and Yanhua Sun.
PPL undergraduate research assistant Forrest Iandola was selected for an Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition for 2011. Forrest was one of two student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to earn the honorable mention. A total of only sixty-three were awarded.
Kale Elevated to IEEE Fellow
Prof. Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale was elevated to IEEE Fellow by the IEEE Board of
Directors at its November 2010 meeting. The elevation, effective 1 January
2011, is "for development of parallel programming techniques."
Kale is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and the director of the Parallel Programming Laboratory (PPL).
One of the signature products of PPL is a parallel programming system called
Charm++. More information about Prof. Kale, PPL, and Charm++ can be found on
the PPL website.
The Parallel Programming Laboratory is looking for undergraduate research assistants. Please follow the above link for more information.
Charm++ 6.2.0 Released
PPL is proud to announce the latest stable version, 6.2.0, of the
Charm++ parallel runtime system and associated libraries and
tools. This release adds support for new platforms, provides several
new and improved features enabling higher performance, and fixes many
bugs discovered since the previous release. Users
should visit the download page for details
and links to the source and precompiled binary archives.
PPL Undergraduate Picked as Finalist for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
The Computing Research Association recently announced their CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher awards for 2010. PPL undergraduate, Edgar Solomonik was picked as a finalist for the honor. Solomonik, a senior in his 2nd year of study, started working with Prof. Kale's Parallel Programming Lab (PPL) in October of 2008 within his first month of attending college. His current research includes improving a highly scalable parallel sorting algorithm and developing a new benchmark for molecular dynamics. This cross-discipline work is important to Charm++, PPL's parallel programming system, NAMD, the highly scalable biomolecular simulation code, and a computational astronomy code called ChaNGa. Edgar received the CS department Best Undergraduate Research Project Award for the 2008-2009 academic year and his research paper titled, "Highly Scalable Parallel Sorting," was accepted for the 2010 IPDPS (IEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium).
"Edgar is an exceptional student," Sanjay Kale, the head of PPL, stated. "It is one thing to finish his BS in two years, but to do the level of publishable research along with that is truly remarkable. He is a valuable member of my research group. I think he is a budding star."
The Computing Research Association presents the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher award yearly and this year it is sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. Microsoft Research and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs are sponsors in alternate years. This represents the second time a PPL undergraduate earned this award. Ekaterina Gonina was awarded an Honorable Mention in 2008.
PPL'er in the Winner's Circle – Awards Announced at SC'09
While attending SC'09 in Portland, OR, PPL member and Ph.D. student Abhinav Bhatele learned he was one of two recipients of the George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellows for 2009.
Bhatele, a 5th year graduate student in the computer science program, was chosen for the George Michael Memorial award based on his research excellence, academic progress, and other criteria that shows his potential to enhance high performance computing. The award provides a monetary stipend for educational expenses and travel expenses for Bhatele to attend SC'10 in New Orleans to provide a status of his research.
Bhatele's doctoral research is on automating the mapping and load balancing of parallel applications considering the interconnect topology of parallel machines. The goal is to minimize network contention by co-locating communicating tasks or objects on nearby physical processors. This work is especially important on 3D mesh interconnects such as IBM Blue Gene and Cray XT machines. This research is independent of the parallel programming model and hence useful for MPI, Charm++ and other applications.
The George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellow award was established by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the IEEE Computer Society, and SC Conference series. It is awarded annually and provides a stipend for up to three fellowship recipients for one academic year, plus travel support to attend the next year's SC conference.
"The George Michael HPC Fellowship Program is designed to directly address this recommendation by honoring exceptional Ph.D. students throughout the world with the focus areas of high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis," wrote William Kramer (pictured above with Abhinav Bhatele and other 2009 recipient), Deputy Director of the Blue Waters Project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
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.
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)