[Colloquium] Reminder: Trebon/Dissertation Defense/Jun 20, 2011

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is a reminder about Nick's Defense on Monday.

       Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                     *** Dissertation Defense ***


Candidate:  Nick Trebon

Date:  Monday, June 20, 2011

Time:  10:30 AM

Place:  Searle 240A

Title: Enabling Urgent Computing within the Existing Distributed
Computing Infrastructure

Abstract:
This dissertation defines the domain of urgent computing as the set of
deadline-constrained scientific simulations and models that are used
to affect some critical decision (e.g., severe weather forecasting,
the modeling of infectious diseases, wildfire simulations,
patient-specific medical treatment). These computations typically
target large, distributed systems (e.g., supercomputers, clusters,
Grids, clouds) that are shared by many users. This resource contention
often leads to nontrivial and highly variable allocation delays that
impede the ability of the computations to meet their deadlines. Thus,
resources that support urgent computing should provide elevated
priority access to these urgent computations. This dissertation
focuses on the additional infrastructure necessary to aid these
critical computations in meeting their deadlines within the current
distributed computing environment. In particular, the combination of
management mechanisms, access policies and tools needed to support
urgent computing on batch queue resources (e.g., supercomputers and
clusters) and computational clouds.

This dissertation describes the implementation of the Special Priority
and Urgent Computing Environment (SPRUCE), a token-based framework
that manages urgent computing users, sessions, and resources. This
framework has been widely deployed on the TeraGrid. Additionally, this
dissertation proposes and evaluates a set of elevated priority
policies that different resource types (i.e., batch queue resources,
cloud resources) can use to support urgent computing. Included in this
evaluation is a discussion of the effect these policies have on
nonurgent users of the resource, along with potential compensation
schemes for affected users. This dissertation also identifies and
evaluates a set of statistical methods and heuristics that can be used
to predict probabilistic upper bounds on the total turnaround time of
the urgent computation (i.e., file staging, resource allocation, and
execution delay). These upper bounds can guide the user in selecting
the resource and policy that offers the greatest probability of
meeting the given deadline.

Nick's advisor is Prof. Ian Foster

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details,
including a draft copy of the dissertation:

 https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/phd_announcements#ntrebon

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Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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