CSEE Colloquium

A Novel Dynamic Task Scheduling Environment
for High Performance Distributed Systems

Tyler Simon

Faculty Research Assistant, UMBC

1:00pm Friday, 21 September 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

The number of concurrently executing tasks required for a single application to perform at the petascale is on the order of hundreds of thousands. Given current manycore hardware trends, future peta- and exa-scale class systems will require applications to run tasks on the order of hundreds of millions to billions. To address the problem of creating, running and managing jobs of this scale, both from a system user and administration perspective we have developed, ARRIA, an Autonomic Runtime for Resource Intensive Applications. ARRIA uses a decentralized bag of tasks and workload scheduler that increases individual job priorities based on weighed factors that are of interest to the application programmer or the system administrator. ARRIA is designed to run millions of independent tasks reliably and efficiently without explicit message passing from the user. In previous work, using the ARRIA scheduler for scientific MapReduce workloads, we have shown a 2.1x speedup over the Hadoop Fair Share scheduler. We investigate novel scheduling parameters and strategies that guarantee efficient job execution for a wide range of realistic and simulated workloads with both user and administrator objectives, such as increased throughput and maximized utilization with minimal wait times for specific job classes. Finally our experiments investigate the long tail phenomenon for mixed workloads and the overheads incurred for increased system size.

Mr. Simon has undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy with a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi, he is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Mr. Simon has worked professionally in the high performance computing (HPC) field for over a decade. In 2005 he earned a Department of Energy graduate research fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked for in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division developing and implementing the Freeloader distributed storage system. Mr. Simon has worked as a computational scientist for the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Office based at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, MS, evaluating both current and future HPC system requirements for applications of interest to the Department of Defense. Since 2009 Mr. Simon has been a computational scientist and manager of HPC user services at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center and is currently a Faculty Research Assistant at the University of Maryland Baltimore County working at the NSF Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research. Mr. Simon’s research involves the study of dynamic distributed runtime environments, parallelization strategies and scheduling of large scale scientific applications for current petascale and future HPC architectures.

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CSEE Colloquium

Computational Brain Connectivity Using Diffusion MRI

Ҫağatay Demiralp
Brown University

1:30pm Tuesday, 18 September 2012, ITE 325B

In my talk, I’ll present examples from modeling, visualization, and analysis of diffusion-derived structural brain connectivity. I’ll first introduce two interactive visual analysis tools that use novel planar representations of the brain. I’ll show that two-dimensional map representations that are viewed, interacted with, and enriched like online geographical maps result in faster and more accurate exploration of brain connectivity.

Second, I’ll introduce neural tract-based probability density functions, including joint densities of tract arc length and scalar diffusivity measures, as biomarkers. I’ll demonstrate their simple and effective use in detecting individual and group differences. I’ll also describe a new coherence measure for neural tract clusters based on geometric slicing. I’ll show that a refinement of neural tract clustering based on this measure leads to a significant improvement in clustering results that is not possible directly using standard methods.

Third, I’ll describe a new coloring method for three-dimensional line fields based on Boy's real projective plane immersion. This coloring method is smooth and one-to-one, except on a set of measure zero. I’ll demonstrate its use in visualization of neural tracts and cross-sectional diffusion MRI brain images.

Çağatay Demiralp is a PhD candidate in computer science at Brown University. His research interests are in characterizing patterned structures in data both qualitatively and quantitatively using topological, geometric as well as statistical approaches. While computational brain connectivity using diffusion MRI has been the focus of his thesis research, he has published on a diverse set of topics ranging from surface deformation to semantic segmentation. He received Brown University’s Brain Sciences Research award, IEEE Vis Best Poster award, and ASSH Best Layout and Best Scientific Presentation awards.

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9253567 - Bussers/Hostess/Food Runners - Aida Bistro
9253551 - Part-Time Teacher - C2 Education Centers
9253673 - Associate Producer - WBAL-TV
9253668 - QA Test Designer - eOriginal, Inc.

The following full-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9253592 - Statistical Consultant - Dun & Bradstreet
9253581 - Project Administrator - eDaptive Systems
9253603 - CBS Radio - Daypart Manager
9253663 - Acquisitions Assistant - Brookes Publishing Co, Inc.
9253599 - Copy/Scan Operator - Courthouse Copy Service

On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines in the next month.

**United Space Alliance
Interviewing on 09/21/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks: 9/7/12)
Positions: Engineering Staff I - ADCO, CRONUS, ETHOS and SPARTAN Flight Controllers
Majors: Physics, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering

**Dupont
Interviewing on 10/1/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks:  9/17/12)
Positions:  Associate Investigators - R&D Engineers; Associate Investigators - R&D Scientists
Majors:  Chemistry, Biochemistry, Engineering

**ARINC Incorporated
Interviewing on 10/5/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks: 9/21/12)
Positions:   Junior Software Engineer, Junior Integration Engineer, Junior Communication Analyst, Junior Network Engineer
Majors:  Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering

**Carrier Corporation
Interviewing on 10/9/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks:  9/25/12)
Positions:  Carrier Commercial Sales Engineer/Technician)
Majors:  Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled this fall is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.

The following research positions have been posted recently to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings! You can also find out more by downloading the attachment.

• Fall Intern - Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry.
  
• On-Campus RC Helicopter pilot- UMBC Geography & Environmental Systems
  
• Research Assistant / United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS)
  
• Protocol Development Intern- Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Student Mental Health Research Assistant - Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Volunteer Opportunities in Mental Health- Sheppard Pratt Health System
  
• Research Assistant / ExecuQuest Corp.
  
• Research Assistant- Sage Policy Group
• Research Clinical Extern- UMB School of Medicine
• Disaster Caseworker-American Red Cross
• Paid Research & Marketing Interns- BioMarker Strategies
• Paid Parent-Child Interaction Video Coder-University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB)
• R&D Intern- Quantum Medical Metrics, LLC
• Research and Policy Assistant- United States Department of Education
• Research Development Intern- iHire, LLC
• Research Intern- The Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit
• Nutrition Intern- University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB)
• Paid Research Technician Intern- Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
• Volunteer Policy/Research Intern- Minority Business Roundtable
• Research Assistantship- Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland
• Advancement Department Intern- American Red Cross 
• Assistant Proposal Coordinator- Ross Technologies, Inc. (RTGX)
• Big Data & Cloud Software and Research- Ross Technologies, Inc. (RTGX)
• Paid Research Assistant- UMBC Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education(CUERE)
  

Four students in UMBC's Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering have been selected for major scholarships to study cybersecurity in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Scholarship for Service (SFS) CyberCorps program.   Each student will receive full tuition, fees, and a nine-month stipend ($20,000 for undergraduates, $25,000 for MS/MPS students, and $30,000 for PhD students) for up to  two years (three years for PhD).  For this first year of the program at UMBC, recipients are Oliver Kubik (BS student in computer science), Brendan Masiar and Brandyn Schult (MPS students in cybersecurity), and Mary Mathews (PhD student in computer science).  

While in the program at UMBC, each student will participate in paid summer internships and have opportunities to engage in mentored research opportunities at the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA) and its partners from industry and government.  Following graduation, each student must work for the government (for pay) for one year for each year of scholarship received.  Drs. Alan T. Sherman and Richard Forno direct the program using support they received from their recently awarded $2.5 million NSF grant.  The CyberCorps program will produce highly-qualified professionals to meet the increasing need to protect American's cyber infrastructure.

Each year students may apply for SFS CyberCorps scholarships at UMBC, with application deadline in mid January.  For details, see www.cisa.umbc.edu.  In each of the next three years, UMBC expects to make six new awards.   Applicants must be accepted to a full-time degree program in a cybersecurity-related field (CS, CE, cyber, EE, IS, math, physics, education, public policy).