[Colloq] Thesis Proposal by Dan Kunkle, Wed. May 6

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents:

Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Dan Kunkle

Date: Wednesday, May 6
Time: 2:00pm
Location: 366 West Village H

Title:
Roomy: A New Approach to Parallel Disk-based Computation

Abstract:
Disk-based computation provides a major new application of disks in
addition to the three traditional uses: file systems, databases, and
virtual memory. Disk-based computation uses the many disks already
available in a computational cluster as main memory. In doing so, we
elevate the disk to a level normally reserved for RAM, and provide
applications with several orders of magnitude more working space for
the same price.

Unfortunately, developing efficient parallel disk-based applications
is often a difficult task. To solve this problem, we propose Roomy: a
new programming language extension for writing parallel disk-based
applications. All aspects of parallelism and remote I/O are hidden
within the Roomy library.

The core of the proposed research is in developing a library of
general algorithms and larger applications on top of Roomy. In doing
so, the two central questions we seek to answer are:

  1. What is the class of applications for which parallel disk-based
computing is practical?

  2. How can existing sequential algorithms and software be adapted to
take advantage of parallel disk-based computing?

Committee:
Gene Cooperman (Advisor)
Panagiotis Manolios
Mirek Riedewald