Research Interests and Projects

I have broad interests in most of computer system research, including distributed and gird computing, operating systems and compiler, high performance and parallel computing, and computer architecture. The scope of the research is mainly scientific applications that requires high performance and parallel computing systems. The purpose in pursing research is to improve application and system performance. I believe, I think you too, a research issue must be addressed in the whole system picture, thus requires us to have enough background in all the system sub-areas in order to conduct quality research. Depending on the applications and target systems,  one specific system area may become the major research focus.

For example, my Ph.D. research is in the scheduling in distributed and grid computing systems for complex scientific workflow applications. Even it is a topic of one system area, it requires both research strength and hand-on experiences in other systems area, e.g. parallel computing (MPI/OpenMP), cluster schedulers, compilers, and even web and web service technologies.

Distributed/grid and parallel computing

• Scientific workflow application scheduling in distributed and grid systems
  Address the major issues and algorithms of scientific workflow scheduling, such as execution coordination, resource reservation and planning, workflow specification and runtime support. More details are in GRACCE project and my Ph.D. dissertation.

• An intelligent and adaptive scheduling hierarchy
  Another ambitious vision of developing develop the next-generation scheduling hierarchy for high-performance and parallel computing. More details.

Operating system

• OpenSolaris PowerPC project as research intern in Sun Research Labs
  Ported Solaris NFS boot, UFS boot and kernel runtime linker for PowerPC
  Developed GRUB2 Multiboot loader for PowerPC
  Debug and testing Genesi ODW Open Firmware implementation

• DragonFlyBSD AMD64 port
  AMD64 (64-bit x86) port of DragonFlyBSD

Computer architecture

• Microprocessor design using Verilog and EDA
  8-bit MicroMIPS process design in digital circuit level
  System board design for paralel/serial communication.