Graduate Student Researcher
Computer Science Department
UC Berkeley
575 Soda Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
USA
(510) 642-9583
csbell at cs dot berkeley dot edu
Update: I'm currently on leave at Pathscale Inc.
I'm a Graduate Student Researcher, focusing on various areas of High-Performance Computing, mostly runtime systems support and communication interfaces for supporting Parallel Languages over High Performance networks.
My advisor is Kathy Yelick.
My research in this area consists in evaluating current High-Performance Network technologies and more importantly, seeing how Parallel programming languages can be efficiently implemented over them. Nowadays, this translates into developement for the GASNet Communications interface, another subject of research here at Berkeley. GASNet provides runtime and communications support for Global-Address Space (GAS) languages, an important language-based approach for solving Parallel Problems in the field of Scientific Computing.
In Parallel Computing, what constitutes the actual network on a High-Performance system is crudely defined, as exemplified by the various flavours of systems currently available (see the very publicized TOP500 list). The Berkeley NOW project brought to light some of the potential of Networks of Workstations and the aggregate computational power that can be harnessed by interconnecting these workstations at high speed. The days of NOW have since evolved due to much more demanding Parallel applications (i.e. not SETI-at-home), which in turn has occasioned system designers to rethink the important parts of their systems. On Clusters, high-Performance Network Interfaces are at the top of this list since they are essentially responsible for bridging the gap between increasing computational power and inter-processor (network) communication, which generally operates at an order of magnitude slower than the processor.
Unified Parallel C, or UPC, is one of the newer language-based approaches to parallel computing, part of the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) family of languages. The language has a consortium, with members of academia, government and various vendors.
My involvement with UPC is through the Berkeley UPC group, a joint effort between UC and LBNL to provide a portable UPC compiler.
When not busy with research or classes, I dedicate my spare time to my beautiful baby daughter.