CS Hosts Summer Students from Around the World

Each summer Computing Sciences hosts its own Summer Student Program with students from various universities in the United States and abroad. The program gives students an opportunity to gain relevant research experience while pursuing their degree. This year 16 students are partnering with one or more staff members on well-defined research projects.

“We rely on a huge number of students,” Deb Agarwal, head of the Distributed Systems Department, told the summer students. “Don’t underestimate your impact at the Lab; this is really important research.”

Many of their projects, which they develop at the Lab during the 12-week summer program, become the basis for their theses. A number of students presented their research findings on Tuesday, August 3. Here is a summary of their presentations:

Ryan McKenzie from the University of Kentucky presented a talk titled “Building High-Level Tool Interfaces with Python.” He addressed the advantages of using high-level software interfaces as teaching tools, specifically in the context of the DOE ACTS Collection. He also discussed the challenges in designing and implementing such an interface. Ryan has been working with CRD’s Tony Drummond and Osni Marques at the Lab.

Viral Shah from UC Santa Barbara presented “Parallel Programming without MPI.” He is working on further developing Matlab*P, what he calls a “simpler, more elegant way to write parallel programming.” He hopes that his work on Matlab*P will become part of his graduate thesis. Viral has been working with CRD’s Parry Husbands, who wrote the original version of Matlab*P for his thesis.

Hormozd Gahvari from UC Berkeley presented “Benchmarking Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication.” A sparse matrix is a matrix that contains mostly zeros with just a few non-zeros. The TOP500 supercomputers are benchmarked by Linpack, which is not a sparse matrix, but a dense matrix multiplication. Gahvari is interested in studying a new approach to benchmarking—creating a version of APEX Map that simultaneously runs on multiple streams. He works with CRD’s Erich Strohmaier and Hongzhang Shan.

Hui Xiong from the University of Minnesota presented “Hyperclique Pattern Discovery and Its Application to Protein Functional Module Extraction.” Hui is researching how the application of a hyperclique pattern—a type of association pattern containing objects that are highly affiliated with each other—to identify functional modules in protein complexes. Proteins in the same functional module tend to involve in common elementary biological function. He has been working with CRD’s Chris Ding and Stephen Holbrook in Physical Biosciences.

Konrad Malkowski from Pennsylvania State University presented “Data Mapping Techniques for Sparse Matrix Factorization.” He is studying how to distribute data during sparse matrix factorization in order to improve system performance. He is also working on improving the accuracy of model's predictions. Specifically, he’s studying the applications of multiple pass methodology in optimizing data mapping. The goal of his work is to make clusters more efficient during solution of sparse matrix systems using direct methods. Konrad has been working with CRD’s Esmond Ng and Parry Husbands.

Lisa Cowan from Mills College presented “Performance of Overlay Construction Algorithms in Representative Applications.” An overlay network is a virtual network built on top of a physical network, such as the Internet. She is studying how to implement an overlay construction algorithm, implement it in a typical application and evaluate its performance. Lisa works with Karlo Berket in the Distributed Systems Department.