Colloquium - Siegel

In a heterogeneous distributed computing environment, a network (or cluster or grid) of different machines is interconnected by high-speed links to provide a variety of computational capabilities. These capabilities can be used to execute a collection of applications, each of which may consist of multiple tasks, where the tasks have diverse computational requirements. The execution times of a task may vary from one machine to the next, and tasks will compete for machines in the suite. Furthermore, there can be inter-task data dependencies. An important research problem for heterogeneous computing is how to decompose applications into tasks, assign tasks to machines, and schedule the order of their execution to maximize some performance criterion. One long-term pursuit in the field of heterogeneous computing is to do this automatically. An overview of a conceptual model of what this involves will be given. An example of assignment and scheduling heuristic research being conducted will be presented. Open problems in the field of heterogeneous distributed computing will be discussed. "Alligators" will be shown.

H. J. Siegel is the Abell Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor of Computer Science at Colorado State University. From 1976 to 2001, he was a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. He received two BS degrees from MIT, and the MA, MSE, and PhD degrees from Princeton University. He has co-authored over 280 technical papers in parallel and distributed computing, is an IEEE Fellow, is an ACM Fellow, was a Coeditor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and was on the Editorial Boards of both the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Computers.

Hosted by Gary Nutt.
Refreshments will be served immediately following the talk in ECOT 831.