Computer Systems and Storage System Laboratory (CASS)

Our Computer Architecture and Storage System (CASS) laboratory has primary research interests which cover a wide spectrum in the areas of high performance and computer systems. A common thread among our research projects focuses on fast data accesses and resource sharing with cost- and energy-efficient management at different levels of memory and storage hierarchies in supercomputer, parallel and distributed computer systems. More recently, CASS research interests cover the areas of interdisciplinary computing, computer architecture, and low-power computing. A significant complimentary thread among CASS extensive research projects emphasize at developing new software tools and hardware platforms to stimulate advances in science and engineering research, where large digital data collections are increasingly prevalent. CASS research projects have been sponsored by several federal funding agencies such as National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA. In the last five years, the total amount of research funding is approximately $3.03M.

Current Members

• Dr. Wang
• Current Students:
• Junyao Zhang (Beginning Fall 2009, Master secured in Fall 2010, Master thesis title: Research on Reverse Lookup Problem in Distributed File System.)
• Qiangju Xiao (Beginning Fall 2010)
• Jianglin Yin (Beginning Spring 2012)
• Alan Birmaher
• Xuhong Zhang
• Qishi Hu

If you are interested in our research program, please contact us.

Alumni

• Pengju Shang, PhD in Summer 2011, dissertation: “Research in high performance and low power computer systems for Data-intensive environment”, First employment after graduation: EMC.
• Lu Chen, Master in Fall 2010, Master thesis title: Concentric layout, a new data layout for matrix set in Hadoop file system.
• Zhengkai Wu, Master in Fall 2010
• Saba Sehrish, PhD in Summer 2010, dissertation: “Improving Performance and Programmer Productivity for I/O-Intensive High Performance Computing Applications”. Master program under Dr. Mark Heinrich's supervision. First employment after graduation: Postdoc in Northwestern University (Alok’s group).
• Sandesh Shankarappa, Master in Summer 2010.
• Johnny Morris, Master, Spring 2009
• Huijun Zhu, Master in Fall 2008.
• Peng Gu, PhD in Summer 2008, dissertation: Metadata and Data Management in High-performance File and Storage Systems; First employment after graduation: Microsoft.
• Dr. Kening Zhang, Research Associate, 2008 (Ph.D. program under Dr. Ron DeMara's supervision).
• Xiaoyu Yao, PhD in Spring 2007, dissertation: Improving Performance and Energy-efficiency in Storage Server Systems; First employment after graduation: Microsoft.
• Dong Li, PhD in Summer 2006, dissertation: High Performance Energy-efficient File and Storage Systems; First employment after graduation: Pillar Data Systems.
• Hailong Cai, PhD in Summer 2006, dissertation: Self-organization and Content Location for Data Sharing Peer-to-Peer Systems; First employment after graduation: Google Inc.
• Jeffrey Gerard, BS with distinction in Spring 2006.
• Brandon Smith, UNL UCARE project 2005.
• Tallman Tyler, UNL UCARE project 2006.
• Matthew Landowski, UCF 2006.
• Matthew Beiser, UCF 2006.

Group News

• Dr. Wang has been interviewed by Orlando CBS TV channel and Florida Today newspaper in Feb. & March 2012 regarding cloud computing and his associated research.
• A sole-PI 3-year NSF Computer Systems Research grant was awarded with an effective date September 2011.
• Our collaborative work with LANL about Scalable Visualization I/O was presented in HEC FSIO workshop in August 2011.
• Dr. Pengju Shang successfully defended his dissertation work in Summer 2011.
• Pengju, Christopher and Junyao, each had one IEEE IPDPS’11 paper accepted for a 20% ever lowest acceptance rate (112/571).
• Dr. Saba Sehrish successfully defended her dissertation work titled “Improving Performance and Programmer Productivity for I/O-Intensive High Performance Computing Applications” on July 8^th 2010.
• Saba’s MRAP framework has been accepted by ACM HPDC’10, with acceptance rate 25% (23/91).
• Dr. Wang won NSF CAREER award.
• Grant Mackey and Christopher Mitchell conducted summer 2008 and 2009 internships on the data intensive HPC file and storage projects in Los Alamos national laboratory.
• A sole-PI 3-year NSF grant was awarded with an effective date in September 2008.
• Dr. Peng Gu defended his Ph.D. dissertation on July 10^th 2008 and joined Microsoft.
• Huijun and Peng published works in ICS08 and ICPP08.

Current Research Projects

· NSF CSR: DSA-Cloud: Data Semantics Aware Clouds for High Performance Analytics, sole PI. 2011-2014. $375K.

· NSF CAREER: Data-Intensive HPC Analytics: A Systems Approach through Extended Interfaces, Data Restructuring and Data-centric Scheduling, sole PI. 2011-2015. $435K.

Recent and Past Research Projects

· NSF: Fast Recovery Using Optimal and Near-Optimal Parallelism in Data-Intensive Computing, sole PI. 2008-2011. $300K.

• A Lightweight, High-performance I/O Management Package for Data-intensive Computing (Department Of Energy-DOE Early Career Principal Investigator Award) sole PI. 2005/07-2011. $300K.
• HEC: Collaborative Research: SAM^2 Toolkit: Scalable and Adaptive Metadata Management for High-End Computing (NSF) w/ Prof. Jiang from Nebraska, etc. 2006-2009. $182K@UCF/$600K in all.
• Collaborative Research: Energy conservation in storage systems using coding techniques (NSF) w/ Prof. Varman from Rice. 2006-2008. $50K@UCF/$225K-Rice.
• NSF: Energy-efficient, high performance storage array systems, sole PI. 2005-2008. $310K.
• An NERSC Allocation Year 2009 award, AY 2009 runs from January 13, 2009 through January 11, 2010.

The MPP award is: 50,000 Cray XT4-equivalent MPP hours for repository m827

The HPSS award is: 500 SRUs for repository m827

• An NERSC Allocation Year 2008 Startup award, AY 2008 runs from January 8, 2008 through January 12, 2009, enable our group to experiment with supercomputers such as Franklin (19,320-processor Opteron MPP/Lustre), Jacquard (712-CPU Opteron Linux cluster/GPFS) (DOE).

· An I/O buffer cache architecture for RDMA (NSF). 2004. Sole PI. $35K.

• Caching and Searching in Peer-to-Peer Systems

· UCFS -- A User-space, High Performance, Custom File System for Web Proxy Servers

· WOLF -- A Novel Reorder Write Buffer for log-structured File System

· PROFS -- Data Placement Scheduling for Log-structured File System on Multi-Zone Disks  

Facilities

· A 16-node Dell Power-edge 1950 cluster, per node Dual Dual-core Intel Xeon Processor, 4 GB memory, 2 500/144 GB SATA/SAS hard drives

· A 48-node Sun Solaris cluster

· A data archive center for SEECS Data warehouse project, including two Dell storage servers and four PowerVault MD1000 Storage Trays (20 TB capacity)

· Seven Dell precision 690 workstations

· An 8-SCSI-Disk RAID System

· A HP/Agilent 34970A System