Two Southern California Universities Named CRPC Affiliated Sites

Computer science groups from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC) were recently named CRPC affiliated sites. The CRPC now has seven core sites and nine affiliated sites nationwide.

Computer Science and Engineering Professor Francine Berman is leader of the UCSD affiliated site. Formerly a member of the CRPC External Advisory Committee, Berman is developing models and software for scheduling parallel applications on distributed heterogeneous resources. Her main focus is a project called AppLeS, which involves developing adaptive scheduling agents for individual applications targeted to distributed and clustered resources. Her work with the CRPC involves making distributed heterogeneous computing configurations, or grids, usable for real applications.

"UCSD is delighted to be an affiliated site of CRPC," says Berman. "We believe that this relationship will greatly benefit existing and new collaborations between UCSD and CRPC researchers."

Carl Kesselman, Director of Heterogeneous Distributed Computing, is the leader of the USC ISI affiliated site. His research interests are in the areas of parallel programming language and environments, high-performance distributing computing, and compositional C++. He is primarily involved with the CRPC through his work on Globus, a research and development project advancing the technology and application of high-performance distributed computing by developing new software tools. He and CRPC researcher Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory recently won the Global Information Infrastructure Next Generation Award for Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed (GUSTO), a prototype for future computational grids that will make computing power available to users on demand the way power grids make electricity available.

Foster and Kesselman are editors of the recently released book, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Written by more than 30 experts in high-performance computing and networking, including Berman, CRPC Director Ken Kennedy, and CRPC researchers Jack Dongarra, Dennis Gannon, Paul Messina, and Daniel Reed, the book provides a vision of what computational grids are, why they are needed, who will use them, and how they will be programmed. (See CRPC-Edited Grid Proclaimed 'A Source for the History of the Future.' ")

"I believe networking is the future of high-performance computation," says Kesselman. "Our affiliation with the CRPC will help advance mechanisms, techniques, and tools to address the problems of configuration and performance optimization in networked supercomputing environments."