Lan Awarded NSF Grant for Topology Awareness

Zhiling Lan, associate professor of computer science, has been awarded a three-year grant for $498,377 from the National Science Foundation for “A Cooperative Framework for Topology Awareness on Large-Scale Systems”

As the number of computer nodes increases, so does the size of the interconnect network. Historically, floating point was the most costly component of a system, but this is no longer the case. Systems today, and those anticipated in the future, are increasingly bound by their communication infrastructure and the power dissipation associated with data movement across the rapidly growing number of nodes. How to address the increasing cost of data movement on ever-growing systems is becoming critical. This project will develop a framework named COTA, a COoperative framework for Topology Awareness. COTA will be an integrated framework that coordinates across the hardware, job scheduler, runtime, and application to jointly attack the increasing concern of data movement for communication- and power-efficiency on large-scale systems. Most importantly, the framework will support topology awareness not only at job startup, but also during job execution. The newly developed mapping algorithms, topology-aware methods and tools, and topology-aware models will provide a critical foundation for the realization of topology awareness on current and future systems.