PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL News

2022

November 2022
CMU Professors Awarded NSF Future of Work Grant

An NSF Future of Work grant is designed to increase opportunities for U.S. workers and generate positive societal and economic impacts both locally and nationally, will fund a project that will investigate how AI-augmented learning can help accelerate student progress in community college information technology (IT) courses. This will in turn provide pathways to family-sustaining careers by making more comprehensive technical education accessible to students. The project team of "A New Bridge to the Digital Economy: Integrated AI-Augmented Learning and Collaboration" includes SCS faculty members Carolyn Rose, Majd Sakr, Lauren Herckis and Bruce McLaren. The SCS team, working in conjunction with The Community College of Allegheny County, will use not only decades of research into computer- and technology-assisted learning science but also the latest developments in the field to enhance lessons.
-- from School of Computer Science News Nov 21, 2022 - Aaron Aupperlee and Heinz College

November 2022
David Anderen wins ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award

Congratulations to Dave on receiving the 2022 Mark Weiser Award for his ongoing insightful and innovative work in systems design! The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by ACM SIGOPS to be given to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in operating systems research. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC.

November 2022
Akshitha Sriraman is a Runner-up for the 2022 Dennis M. Ritchie Thesis Award

Congratulations to Akshitha! Her dissertation "Enabling Hyperscale Web Services, presentedat the University of Michigan under the advisorship ot Tomas Wenisch has been noted as a runner-up to the The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award was created in 2013 by ACM SIGOPS to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.

October 2022
Zhihao Jia Wins Amazon Research Award

Congratulations to Zhihao on receiving an Amazon Research Award funded under the fall 2021 AWS AI and winter 2022 Alexa: Fairness in AI call for proposals for his ideas on "Towards Affordable and Accessible ML by Leveraging Heterogeneous Spot Instances. "Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content, their creativity, and their potential to impact both the research community and society more generally. Theoretical advances, creative new ideas, and practical applications were all considered. The Amazon Research Awards program provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating research topics across a number of disciplines.

June 2022
Rashmi Vinayak Awarded Meta Research Grant

In February 2022, Meta launched the Silent Data Corruptions at Scale request for proposals. Within this novel research domain, a a diversity of research opportunities was identified, such as architectural solutions to data corruption; fleetwide testing strategies and distributed computing resiliency models; software and library resiliency; and silicon level design, simulation, and manufacturing approaches. Rashmi's proposal on "Lightweight in-production SDC detection tools inspired by coding theory" to address the problem of silent data corruption, or data errors that go undetected in large-scale infrastructure systems was one of 5 chosen to receive the award.

June 2022
Brian Schwedock and Co-authors Nominated for Best Paper at ISCA’22

Congratulations to Brian Schwedock and his co-authors on the nomination of "täkō: A Polymorphic Cache Hierarchy for General-Purpose Optimization of Data Movement" for Best Paper and presented at ISCA ’22 in New York this June. täkō aims to improve software’s ability to observe and respond to data movement, improving many inefficiencies, including the growing fraction of execution time and energy devoted to data movement itself.

April 2022
Best Paper at EuroSys'22!

Congratulations to Sanjith Athlur, a new graduate student with the PDL, on achieving a Best Paper award at Eurosys 2022 for his work on "Varuna: Scalable, Low-cost Training of Massive Deep Learning Models." Varuna makes thrifty use of available networking resources and automatically configures the user’s training job in massive deep learning models to efficiently use any given set of resources, reducing the effects of scalability limits on job parallelism and resource fragmentation. Sanjith will be working toward his Ph.D. in Computer Science with Rashmi Vinayak and Greg Ganger.

March 2022
1992 Paper Noted as Influential by ASPLOS'22

A 1992 paper written by Todd Mowry, PDL faculty and professor in the Computer Science Department, and SCS alums Monica Lam and Anoop Gupta received an influential paper award at this year’s International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages (ASPLOS). The paper, "Design and Evaluation of a Compiler Algorithm for Prefetching", proposed a compiler algorithm to insert prefetch instructions into code that operates on dense matrices.
-- from SCS WEDNESDAY WIRE: March 30, 2022

February 2022
Dimitrios Skarlatos and Team Win Best Paper Award at ASPLOS '22!

Congratulations to Dimitrios Skarlatos, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, for receiving a best paper award for "TMO: Transparent Memory Offloading in Datacenters" at ASPLOS 2022. ASPLOS is the premier forum for interdisciplinary systems research, intersecting computer architecture, hardware and emerging technologies, programming languages and compilers, operating systems and networking.
-- from SCS WEDNESDAY WIRE: March 9, 2022

January 2022
Rashmi Vinayak Receives 2021 VMware Systems Research Award

Congratulations to Rashmi Vinayak, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU, on the occasion of her 2021 VMware Sytems Research Award. The award is given in recognition of the originality, impact and future potential of Rashmi's research, which focuses on work to enhance computer system reliability and efficiency by combining coding-theoretic algorithms, machine learning models and systems. See VMware's Award Announcement page for more details.

2021

November 2021
PDL Paper wins ACM SoCC Test of Time Award!

The ACM SoCC 2021 test of time award goes to "Heterogeneity and Dynamicity of Clouds at Scale: Google Trace Analysis"! Congratulations to the authors Charles Reiss, Alexey Tumanov, Gregory R. Ganger, Randy H. Katz, and Michael A. Kozuch for their impactful work. The paper was first introduced at the 3rd ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, held from October 14th-17th, 2012, in San Jose, CA. The paper helps its readers to better understand the challenges in developing effective cloudbased resource schedulers, analyzing the first publicly available trace data from a sizable multi-purpose cluster.

More PDL News here.