My research interests currently involve the University of Illinois High Performance Virtual Machine project. HPVM leverages commodity hardware (x86 architecture machines, Myrinet, ServerNet, Fast Ethernet) and commodity software (Windows NT, Solaris, Linux) against custom high-bandwidth low-latency messaging layers (Illinois Fast Messages). This combination allows for increased accessibility and performance of computational resources for high-performance computing applications. In addition, we provide popular Application Programmer Interfaces such as the Message Passing Interface (MPI) which enables application developers to quickly and easily port existing high-performance applications to the HPVM environment. The objective is to reduce the effort required to build high performance applications on distributed systems while at the same time allowing application developers to take advantage of the increasing performance of popular low-cost commodity computing systems.

Our current compute cluster consists of 32 dual-processor 200 MHz Pentium Pro machines utilizing a Myrinet interconnect and running Windows NT Server 4.0. With this cluster, we have demonstrated performance on parallel scientific applications superior to that achievable on mid-range parallel supercomputers.

More information about the High Performance Virtual Machine project is available from https://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/hpvm.html.

Gregory A. Koenig (koenig@uiuc.edu)
Research Programmer - Concurrent Systems Architecture Group
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig