Xian-He Sun Receives NSF Grant for High-End Computing

Department chair and professor Xian-He Sun has been awarded a three-year grant for $280,766 from the National Science Foundation for "Decoupled Execution Paradigm for Data-Intensive High-End Computing".

I/O on High-End Computing (HEC) machines is increasingly becoming the primary performance bottleneck. However, conventional execution paradigms for HEC are computing-centric and have inherent limitations in addressing critical I/O issues of data-intensive applications. This project proposes using a decoupled execution paradigm (DEP) to address I/O bottleneck issues by enabling users to identify and handle data-intensive operations separately.

The research has three objectives: Understanding the execution paradigm requirement from the data-centric point of view, studying the feasibility of the proposed decoupled execution paradigm, and providing a partially implemented prototyping of DEP and its associated system design to support the first two objectives. Several technical hurdles have been identified, which include system architecture, programming model, and runtime system. Solutions are proposed and detailed plans are provided to evaluate the newly proposed decoupled execution paradigm.