University of Illinois Plans (Celso)

(see URL: http://www-pablo.cs.uiuc.edu/People/Postdocs/Mendes/CelsoMendes.htm)

This is a short summary of what our group will be doing this Summer,
with possible relation to the SciDAC work; there's a lot of other
activities going on in the cluster development front at NCSA, but
that is not included here, as Rob Pennington (who is also in the
project) would have the details:

1) Automation of the Performance-Monitoring features in the GrADS
   project (Grid Application Development Software), where we are
   developing performance contracts that can be used to monitor
   and steer applications in a grid environment.

2) Implementation of additional features to the SvPablo toolkit,
   such as access to hardware performance counters through the
   PAPI interface, and dynamic application patching using the 
   Dyninst API; this second part has been done for sequential
   applications, and will be extended for parallel ones.

3) Integration between the PPFS (developed here) and PVFS (public
   domain) parallel file systems, providing an efficient file system 
   based on real time control and adaptive policy selection.
   A first version of this integration effort is expected to be
   available early this Summer.

Our primary targets so far have been Solaris and Linux based clusters,
but some of these pieces are available in other platforms too,

As far as human resources go, I'm personally involved in (1) and (2),
while all three tasks above have other staff people involved. (1) has
a grad student who will be finishing his master's thesis this Summer.
We have a few other grad students who are doing thesis on some of those.
We haven't discussed yet when more students would be added to these,
in view of the SciDAC grant, but we'll definitely be able to get new
incoming students early this Fall (September), after classes start.

-Celso