Evaluating architecture impact on system energy efficiency.

As the energy consumption has been surging in an unsustainable way, it is important to understand the impact of existing architecture designs from energy efficiency perspective, which is especially valuable for High Performance Computing (HPC) and datacenter environment hosting tens of thousands of servers. One obstacle hindering the advance of comprehensive evaluation on energy efficiency is the deficient power measuring approach. Most of the energy study relies on either external power meters or power models, both of these two methods contain intrinsic drawbacks in their practical adoption and measuring accuracy.

Speeding up profiling program's runtime characteristics for workload consolidation.

Workload consolidation is a common method to increase resource utilization of the clusters or data centers while still trying to ensure the performance of the workloads. In order to get the maximum benefit from workload consolidation, the task scheduler has to understand the runtime characteristics of the individual program and schedule the programs with less resource conflict onto the same server. We propose a set of metrics to comprehensively depict the runtime characteristics of programs.

IOPA: I/O-aware parallelism adaption for parallel programs.

With the development of multi-/many-core processors, applications need to be written as parallel programs to improve execution efficiency. For data-intensive applications that use multiple threads to read/write files simultaneously, an I/O sub-system can easily become a bottleneck when too many of these types of threads exist; on the contrary, too few threads will cause insufficient resource utilization and hurt performance. Therefore, programmers must pay much attention to parallelism control to find the appropriate number of I/O threads for an application.

Game Theoretical Analysis on Cooperation Stability and Incentive Effectiveness in Community Networks.

Community networks, the distinguishing feature of which is membership admittance, appear on P2P networks, social networks, and conventional Web networks. Joining the network costs money, time or network bandwidth, but the individuals get access to special resources owned by the community in return. The prosperity and stability of the community are determined by both the policy of admittance and the attraction of the privileges gained by joining.

Balancing the Lifetime and Storage Overhead on Error Correction for Phase Change Memory.

As DRAM is facing the scaling difficulty in terms of energy cost and reliability, some nonvolatile storage materials were proposed to be the substitute or supplement of main memory. Phase Change Memory (PCM) is one of the most promising nonvolatile memory that could be put into use in the near future. However, before becoming a qualified main memory technology, PCM should be designed reliably so that it can ensure the computer system's stable running even when errors occur.

GPU acceleration of Dock6's Amber scoring computation.

Dressing the problem of virtual screening is a long-term goal in the drug discovery field, which if properly solved, can significantly shorten new drugs' R&D cycle. The scoring functionality that evaluates the fitness of the docking result is one of the major challenges in virtual screening. In general, scoring functionality in docking requires a large amount of floating-point calculations, which usually takes several weeks or even months to be finished.