Alumni Fellowship
The Computer Science Alumni Fellowship is awarded annually to a Ph.D. candidate (or candidates), in the final year of study, allowing the student(s) to work full time on dissertation research. Generous contributions to the Alumni Trust Fund, made by alumni and friends of the Department of Computer Science, help to make this fellowship possible.
Stephen Olivier is the recipient of the 2011-2012 Computer Science Alumni Fellowship.
Power and speed-of-light limitations have given us processors that offer multiple computing cores instead of a single, but faster, processor. Hence parallel execution is now the principal route to increased performance. However parallel programming models are still quite rudimentary and oriented toward details of the parallel processor architectures rather than addressing parallelism in a problem-centric framework. Task parallel programming is a high-level shared memory programming paradigm well suited to the construction of adaptive and recursive algorithms in scientific computing and other areas. The computation to be performed is presented in the form of interdependent tasks created in the course of program execution in an input-dependent fashion that often cannot be analyzed a priori.
Stephen is working with Professor Jan Prins to develop efficient task scheduling strategies that balance load among the processors while preserving locality of reference among tasks on modern shared memory systems, with their complex cache hierarchies and non-uniform memory access characteristics. A subset of these strategies is transparent to the programmer, while others allow the programmer to express explicit locality constraints to inform the scheduler. Working with Alan Porterfield at RENCI, Stephen has implemented his task schedulers using the open-source Qthreads multi-threading library, distributed by Sandia National Laboratories, to run full-size task parallel applications expressed using the OpenMP standard.
Evaluations demonstrate improvement in parallel speedup on benchmark OpenMP task parallel applications over existing state-of-the-art schedulers in the Intel and GNU OpenMP run time systems. Stephen has also developed performance analysis techniques to measure run time overheads, non-local data access costs, and load imbalance. His Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS) benchmark evaluates the scalability of dynamic load balancing strategies on a wide range of parallel systems, from multi-core machines to clusters of thousands of processors.
2010-2011
Recipient: Rahul Narain (Ph.D. 2011)
Dissertation: "Visual Simulation of Multiscale Phenomena"
Advisor: Ming Lin
2009-10 (3 recipients)
Recipient: Gennette Gill (Ph.D. 2010)
Dissertation: “Analysis and Optimization for Pipelined Asynchronous Systems”
Advisor: Montek Singh
Recipient: Xiaoxiao Liu (Ph.D. 2010)
Dissertation: “Shape-correlated Statistical Modeling and Analysis for Respiratory Motion Estimation”
Advisor: Stephen Pizer
Recipient: Jason Sewall (Ph.D. 2010)
Dissertation: “Efficient, Scalable Traffic and Compressible Fluid Simulations Using Hyperbolic Models”
Advisor: Ming Lin
2007-08
Recipient: Aaron Block (Ph.D. 2008)
Dissertation: “Adaptive Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems”
Advisor: James Anderson
Spring 2007
Recipient: Eli Broadhurst (Ph.D. 2008)
Dissertation: "Compact Appearance in Object Populations Using Quantile Function Based Distribution Families"
Advisor: Stephen Pizer
Fall 2006
Recipient: David Borland (Ph.D. 2007)
Dissertation: “Flexible Occlusion Rendering for Improved Views of Three-Dimensional Medical Images”
Advisor: Russell M. Taylor
2005-06
Recipient: Jun “Luke” Huan (Ph.D. 2006)
Dissertation: “Graph-based Pattern Discovery in Protein Structures”
Advisor: Jan Prins and Wei Wang
Spring 2005
Recipient: Olufisayo Omojokun (Ph.D. 2006)
Dissertation: “Interacting with Networked Devices”
Advisor: Prasun Dewan
2004-05
Recipient: Miguel Otaduy (Ph.D. 2004)
Dissertation: "6-DoF Haptic Rendering Using Contact Levels of Detail and Haptic Textures."
Advisor: Ming Lin
2003-04
Recipient: Philip Holman (Ph.D. 2004)
Dissertation: "Implementation of Pfair-scheduled Multiprocessor Systems."
Advisor: James Anderson
2002-03
Recipient: Michele Weigle (Ph.D. 2003)
Dissertation: "Investigating the Use of Synchronized Clocks in TCP Congestion Control"
Advisor: Kevin Jeffay
2001-02
Recipient: Paul Yushkevich (Ph.D. 2003)
Dissertation: "Statistical Shape Characterization Using the Medial Representation"
Advisor: Stephen M. Pizer
2000-01
Recipient: Nicholas Vallidis (Ph.D. 2002)
Dissertation: "WHISPER: A Spread Spectrum Approach to Occlusion in Acoustic Tracking"
Advisor: Gary Bishop
1999-00
Recipient: Voicu Popescu (Ph.D. 2001)
Dissertation: "High-Quality Forward Reconstruction for 3D Warping Efficiently Implementable in Hardware"
Advisor: Anselmo Lastra
1998-99
Recipient: William R. Mark (Ph.D. 1999)
Dissertation: "Post-Rendering 3D Image Warping: Visibility, Reconstruction, and Performance for Depth-Image Warping"
Advisor: Gary Bishop
1997-98
Recipient: Stephen M. Goddard, Jr. (Ph.D. 1998)
Dissertation: "On the Management of Latency in the Synthesis of Real-Time Signal Processing Systems from Processing Graphs"
Advisor: Kevin Jeffay
1996-97
Recipient: Jacob D. Furst (Ph.D. 1999)
Dissertation: "Height Ridges of Oriented Medialness"
Advisor: Stephen M. Pizer
1995-96
Recipient: Mark Moir (Ph.D. 1996)
Dissertation: "Efficient Object Sharing in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors"
Advisor: James Anderson
1994-95
Recipient: John Menges (M.S. 1990)
Dissertation: Still in progress
Advisor: Kevin Jeffay
Recipient: Donald L. Stone (Ph.D. 1995)
Dissertation: "Managing the Effect of Delay Jitter on the Display of Live Continuous Media"
Advisor: Kevin Jeffay
1993-94
Russell M. Taylor II (Ph.D. 1994)
Dissertation: "The Nanomanipulator: A Virtual-Reality Interface to a Scanning Tunneling Microscope"
Advisor: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
1992-93
Recipient: Ross Whitaker (Ph.D. 1993)
Dissertation: "Geometry-Limited Diffusion"
Advisor: Stephen M. Pizer
1991-92
Recipient: James Chung (Ph.D. 1993)
Dissertation: "Intuitive Navigation in the Targeting of Radiation Therapy Treatment Beams"
Advisor: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.