Research Interests for Jim Teresco

My research interests are in parallel scientific computing, in particular architecture-aware computation and dynamic load balancing. I have been implementing the Dynamic Resource Utilization Model (DRUM), which supports hierarchical and architecture-dependent load balancing in conjunction with the Zoltan Toolkit. By using DRUM with Zoltan, any of the applications that use Zoltan can better tailor partitions to a given architecture. I have also implemented a hierarchical partitioning scheme within Zoltan. I am interested in finding efficient and convenient ways to combine message passing with multithreading to achieve optimal performance. Five of my summer students at Williams, Kai Chen '04, Lida Ungar '02, Diane Bennett '03, Laura Effinger-Dean '06, and Arjun Sharma '07, have contributed to this work. I continue to collaborate with the Flaherty, Shephard, and Szymanski research groups at RPI, and with the Zoltan group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. I spent much of my leave in 2003-04 at Sandia as a Computer Science Research Institute visitor. Locally, I manage the Bullpen Cluster, a collection of Sun Microsystems Enterprise servers, networked together to form a 24-processor parallel computer.

I am also working on a project to try to take advantage of Grid computing environments, perhaps better named "Internet computing environments," for large-scale scientific computation. The extreme processor and heterogeneites and hierarchies present new challenges, and make architecture-aware programming essential to achieve acceptable performance. I am part of the Rensselaer Grid group which is investigating these issues. I have worked with Carlos Varela and his student Kaoutar El Maghraoui at RPI on the development of IOS/MPI, which is an extension that allows process migration within an MPI program. Both DRUM and Zoltan's hierarchical balancing implementation will play important roles in extending large-scale parallel adaptive computation into Grid environments.

I have recently become interested in high-performance computing for bioinformatics, and I am part of the BiGP (Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics) program that has been formed at Williams.

Here's a picture from a research visit to Sandia, taken April 11, 2002:

Front row from left to right: Karen Devine, Pavel Bochev, Rich Lehoucq, David Ropp (all Sandians). Back row from left to right: Curtis Ober, Simon Tavener, Donald Estep, Jim Teresco, Max Gunzburger, Joseph Flaherty, Martin Berggren, Bill Hart, John Shadid, Roscoe Bartlett. (Ober, Berggren, Hart, Shadid, Bartlett-Sandians; Tavener and Estep, Colorado State University; Teresco, Williams College; Flaherty, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Gunzburger, Iowa State University).

E-mail domain: cs.williams.edu, username: terescoj -- Thu Dec 2 10:54:13 EST 2004