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High Performance Computing (HPC) at UH

Researcher of the Month
Henri Casanova, PhD

picture of Henri Casanova, PhD

Dr. Casanova started at UH in August 2005. His first task was to .adopt. the Dell cluster, comprised of 96 compute nodes and 3 service nodes. Two racks are on the third floor of the POST building and one rack is in the basement of the POST building. He now heads up the UH Dell Cluster Committee. To find out more about this committee, the cluster, and getting an account, you can go to the website at http://navet.ics.hawaii.edu/~uhdellcluster/.

He has created and taught two High Performance Computing (HPC) targeted courses as part of the ICS curriculum: the undergraduate Concurrent and High Performance Programming course, and the graduate Principles of High Performance Computing course. In addition he has taught related courses such as Computer Architecture and Machine-Level and Systems Programming, both at the undergraduate level. He is currently advising four doctoral candidates.

One of Dr. Casanova's current research projects centers on the simulation of distributed computing platforms (clusters and supercomputers, grids, peer-to-peer systems) in order to evaluate their performance for various applications. This is extremely helpful for research and development teams who are trying to decide which systems to purchase or to build. They can simulate several candidate systems for a range of application scenarios representative of the intended future applications, and evaluate their respective performance on the simulated systems, which is both fast and cost-effective. This is a clear and significant improvement over simply comparing flops, network bandwidths, and storage capacities!

His research group has developed a simulation framework to make the above possible, called SimGrid (see poster on the SimGrid project). You can go to Dr. Casanova.s home page [http://navet.ics.hawaii.edu/~casanova/] or contact him directly for further information about his research or about the Dell cluster.