Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 01:43:28 GMT Server: Apache/1.1.1 Content-type: text/html Content-length: 6537 Last-modified: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 15:52:02 GMT College of Computing - Systems Research Group Home Page

Systems Research Group


What's New!


Motivation

Parallel and distributed machines have become the premiere computational engines for both business and research endeavors, and their use is permeating into many other disciplines. In addition, new ways of interacting with computers have evolved, enabling higher levels of interaction among end users as well as enhanced interactivity between end users and their programs than previously possible. As a result of these developments, large-scale applications routinely use multiple distributed and prallel machines connected by high performance communcation media.

The architectural environment for facilitating the construction and use of interactive distributed and parallel applications is multigranular -- consisting of fine-grain SIMD machines, medium-grain MIMD machines, and coarse-grain mulitcomputers comprised of a farm of high-peformance workstations, all of which are interconnected via high speed networks. While such hardware and some of the software components are readily available, what is lacking is the technology for easily assembling them to form complete applications that are efficient, flexible, and highly usable for non-computer scientists. The development of such technology is a fundamental challenge for systems researchers.

The systems group in the College of Computing addresses this challenge in an application-conscious way. The research projects currently being investigated cross the boundaries of architecture, operating systems, compilers and programming languages, and usability: