Contents:

• Lecture
• Panel Session
• Links to CS Graduate School Resources

Advances in processor and network speeds have resulted in the feasibility of distributed interaction among application components. At the same time, computationally intensive components of these applications requiring parallel computing can increasingly use clusters of SMPs (symmetric multiprocessors), a highly available platform, effectively.

In this talk, I will present a transparent system for sharing memory that we are developing here at Rochester with such applications in mind. Our goal is to provide both ease-of-use and efficiency. The system, called InterWeave, represents a merger and extension of our previous Cashmere-2L and InterAct projects. Cashmere-2L is a software distributed shared memory system that extends shared memory parallelism across multiple SMP nodes. InterAct is a system for sharing data across distributed and possibly loosely-coupled processes that can dynamically choose to participate in the sharing. InterWeave combines hardware coherence within small multiprocessors, Cashmere-style lazy release consistency within tightly coupled clusters, and InterAct-style version-based coherence for distributed shared segments. I will begin by describing the key innovations in Cashmere-2L and InterAct, and then discuss the merger and extension of these environments.

• Sandhya Dwarkadas,
  Associate Professor University of Rochester
  Ph.D. Rice University, 1993
  Research in Parallel and Distributed Computing, Computer Architecture, Compilers

• Lisa Meeden,
  Associate Professor Swarthmore College
  Ph.D. Indiana University, 1994
  Research in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Robotics

• Jessica Kornblum,
  5th year Ph.D. student, University of Pennsylvania
  B.S DePauw University
  Research in Network Monitoring
  Bell Labs and IBM Zurich Internships, GAANN fellowship for minorities

• Karin Kipper Schuler,
  7th year Ph.D. student, University of Pennsylvania
  Research in Natural Language Processing
  Lecturer in Brazil, Brazilian scholarship-4 years

• Alexandra Kinyon,
  5th year Ph.D. student, University of Pennsylvania, & finishing Ph.D. in Linguistics, Universite Paris 7
  Research in Computational Linguistics
  BA Sorbonne, BA & MA Universite Paris 7
  NYU & UPenn fellowships, Researcher at French Ministry of Research

• Tia Newhall,
  Assistant Professor Swarthmore College
  Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1999
  Research in performance measurement, dynamic compilation, parallel & distributed systems