Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 6, Issue 2
Spring/Summer 1998
Volume
3, Issue 1
January 1995
Volume
2, Issue 4
October 1994
Volume
2, Issue 1
January 1994
PARALLEL PROFILE
Marina Chen
Professor and Department Chair, Computer Science Department, Boston University; and President, Cooperating Systems Corporation
Marina Chen has been involved with the CRPC since 1989 as a member of the External Advisory Committee, and recently, through research collaborations with CRPC scientists at the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University. Her work with Geoffrey Fox, Wojtek Furmanski, and other collaborators in the field of wide-area distributed heterogeneous computing has led to the recent naming of Boston University as the fifth CRPC affiliated site.
Chen has been Professor and Department Chair of the Computer Science Department at Boston University and council member of the university's Center for Computational Science since 1994. She has been President of Cooperating Systems Corporation, a computer research company, since 1993. She began her career as an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department at Yale University in 1983 and was associate professor from 1987 to 1993. Chen has a B.S. in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University (1978) and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the California Institute of Technology (1980 and 1983).
Chen's current work in the field of metacomputing combines Web-based technology and resource management techniques to provide reliability and quality of service guarantees for collaborative, transportable computing. "The most exciting aspect of this work is the opportunity to make computer science research useful for the HPCC community," she says. "Specifically, we are focusing on research teams whose applications require the coordination of geographically dispersed expertise, hardware, and software resources."
Chen recently helped launch the Metacenter Affiliated Resource in the New England Region (MARINER) project, a collaboration of Boston University's Computer Science Department and Center for Computational Science that established the university as a regional resource for advanced computational infrastructure technologies. "We expect the tools developed for reliable, responsible metacomputing will be demonstrated to industry, government, health care organizations, and educational institutions in the New England region via the existing mechanisms set up by the MARINER project," she says.
Last year, Chen collaborated with Fox, Furmanski, Jim Cowie of Cooperating Systems Corporation, and Arjen Lenstra and Sandeep Bhatt of Bellcore on the RSA-130 factoring project, which won the High- Performance Computing Challenge Award for Most Geographically Dispersed and Heterogeneous Factoring on the World-Wide Computer in the Teraflop Challenge contest at Supercomputing '95. (See Research Focus section of Volume 4, Issue 2 - 1996 .)
Prior to her interest in metacomputing, Chen pioneered compilation techniques for mapping high-level languages to distributed-memory machines, focusing on methods of data distribution, alignment, and automatic generation of communications. Her work in the area of "domain morphism," formalizing the mapping from logical array to physically distributed memory and its use as program annotations, is one of the precursors to the data distribution directives of High Performance Fortran.
Chen has been a consultant to companies and institutions, including Scientific Computing Associates, Floating Point Systems, Silicon Compilers Inc., and the Computer Science Department at the California Institute of Technology. Her professional affiliations include serving as secretary of the Association for Computing Machinery, voting member of the High Performance Fortran Forum, editorial board member of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and associate editor of the Journal of Programming Language. In addition to her Supercomputing '95 award, Chen has won the 1987 and 1988 Gordon Bell Awards for the Crystal Compiler, a pioneering, high-level language compiler for parallel machines. She was an IBM Doctoral Fellow in 1982 and received best paper awards at IEEE ICCD '86 and Supercomputing '90.