Faculty

Sanjay Patel, Application Coordinator

Area(s) of Expertise: High-performance processor microarchitecture, Processor reliability

Having recently designed chips for gaming, physical simulation and visualization, Patel is interested in examining many-core processing and accelerator systems for the emerging revolution in visually-oriented,interactive applications. Patel has extensive industry experience having done architecture, hardware verification, logic design, and performance modeling at Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel Corporation, HAL Computer Systems, Transmeta, and Ageia Technologies. He is currently the Chief Architect and Technologist at Ageia Technologies.

Current UPCRC Projects: Image-based Rendering

Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering

Email: sjp at illinois.edu

Sarita Adve

Area(s) of Expertise: Computer Architecture and Systems, Parallel Computing, Power Management, Reliability

Co-developer of the memory consistency models for the Java and C++ programming languages, which are based on her PhD thesis work on data-race-free memory models. Other significant contributions include the concepts of lifetime reliability aware architecture and dynamic reliability management, work on cross-layer energy management, exploiting instruction-level parallelism for memory system performance, and multiprocessor simulation methods.

Current UPCRC Projects: Disciplined Shared Memory, Runtime System, Hardware Architecture, DeNovo

Department: Computer Science

Email: sadve at illinois.edu

Vikram Adve

Area(s) of Expertise: Compilers, Programming Languages,Computer Architecture, Performance Modeling

Adve's group created the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, a novel framework for "lifelong" compilation of programs. Developed an elegant "Integer Set Framework" for compiling data- parallel programs, powerful compiler-based techniques for speeding up simulations of large-scale parallel applications, techniques for mapping low-level performance information to high-level parallel language programs, and analytical techniques for predicting performance of parallel programs and systems.

Current UPCRC Projects: Disciplined Shared Memory, Domain-Specific Environments, Translation Environment, Hardware Architecture, DeNovo

Department: Computer Science

Email: vadve at illinois.edu

Minh N. Do

Area(s) of Expertise: Image Formation and Processing

Do's research interests include image and multi-dimensional signal processing, computational imaging, wavelets and multiscale geometric analysis, and visual information representation.

Current UPCRC Projects: Image-based Rendering

Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering

Email: minhdo at illinois.edu

Maria Garzaran

Area(s) of Expertise: Compilation and Continuous Program Optimization

Generation of library routines for sorting and data mining that adapt to the input, development of analytical models.

Current UPCRC Projects: Parallel Operators, Metaprogramming and Autotuning, Translation Environment

Department: Computer Science

Email: garzaran at illinois.edu

John Hart

Area(s) of Expertise: Parallel GPU Algorithms and Computer Graphics

Awarded the first NSF Grant (Revolutionary Computing ITR) for GPGPU,in 2001. Developed Ray Engine, the first GPU implementation of a ray tracer. GPU algorithm work utilized in Microsoft and NVidia products.

Current UPCRC Projects: Dynamic Virtual Environments

Department: Computer Science

Email: jch at illinois.edu

Thomas S. Huang

Area(s) of Expertise: Computer Vision, Image Compression and Enhancement, Pattern Recognition, and Multimodal Signal Processing.

Huang's research lies in two related areas: Multimodal (esp. audio and visual) human computer interaction; and Multimedia (images, video, audio, text) annotation and search. Research projects in the first area include: Visual hand tracing and gesture recognition; audio-visual recognition of gender, age group, and emotion. Projects in the second area include: Web-based face annotation and recognition; multimedia profiling of broadcast news anchors.

Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering

Email: t-huang at illinois.edu

Ralph Johnson

Area(s) of Expertise: Software Design, Software Reuse, and Programming Environments.

One of four co-authors of "Design Patterns", a seminal book on software design. Leader of the group that developed the first refactoring tool, the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser. Leader of the group that developed Photran, a widely used open-source Fortran-77 and Fortran-90 IDE.

Worked on frameworks for compilers, operating systems, graphics editors, music generation, network protocol stacks, telephone billing, insurance, and stellar simulation.

Current UPCRC Projects: Patterns, Domain-Specific Environments

Department: Computer Science

Email: rjohnson at illinois.edu

Laxmikant Kale

Area(s) of Expertise: Parallel Programming, Dynamic Adaptation, Science and Engineering Applications

Developed Charm++ Parallel Programming System and its ideas of automatic adaptive runtime systems. Co-developed some of the most scalable science and engineering applications, including NAMD for biomolecular simulations, and ChaNGa for gravity simulations in cosmology. Earlier work resulted in some of the most effective strategies for parallel state-space search.

Current UPCRC Projects: Runtime System

Department: Computer Science

Email: kale at illinois.edu

Sam King

Area(s) of Expertise: Secure and Robust Software Systems

King's research interests are in designing, implementing, and analyzing secure and robust software systems. His current and future work spans across all levels of software from low-level virtual-machine monitor and operating system software to high-level application code.

Department: Computer Science

Email: kingst at illinois.edu

Darko Marinov

Area(s) of Expertise: Software Testing, Program Analysis and Transformation

Released two open-source tools for testing programs with structurally complex inputs, which found dozens of bugs in Eclipse, NetBeans, and several academic projects. Recent work on parallel test generation and execution done in collaboration with Google.

Current UPCRC Projects: Hardware Architecture, The Bulk Multicore

Department: Computer Science

Email: marinov at illinois.edu

Klara Nahrstedt

Area(s) of Expertise: Quality of Service Management, Multimedia Systems, QoS-aware Resource Management

Research interests in services and protocols for provision of end-to-end quality of services within distributed multimedia systems. Her research group works on time-variant QoS management, QoS routing, multimedia middleware, peer-to-peer networks, multimedia services for smart rooms, pervasive computing, multimedia operating systems, adaptive cross-layer design of resource management for multimedia mobile systems, and HDTV distribution protocols.

Current UPCRC Projects: Tele-immersive Environments

Department: Computer Science

Email: klara at illinois.edu

David Padua

Area(s) of Expertise: Compilers/Library Generators

Contributed to several areas related to parallel computing including auto parallelization, debugging, parallel machine organization, parallel programming languages, parallel algorithms and automatic library generation. His work on coarse-grain parallelization of do loops, race detection using trace analysis and signal processing library generation has been particularly influential. He has long standing collaborations with several faculty members at Illinois as well as members of other institutions including Carnegie-Mellon University, IBM Research, Intel and Purdue University.

Current UPCRC Projects: Parallel Operators, Metaprogramming and Autotuning, Translation Environment

Department: Computer Science

Email: padua at illinois.edu

Madhu Parthasarathy

Area(s) of Expertise: Bug-finding, Model-checking, Verification, and Automata Theory

Interests span the areas of model-checking, static analysis, and verification of software, with emphasis on automated techniques that rely on sophisticated theoretical ideas that offer scalable solutions. He has implemented several novel techniques and tools: the theory of visibly pushdown automata to depict software models with recursion, temporal and modal logics to describe local and global program flows in programs, automatic interface synthesis tools (Jist) using computational learning, algorithms and tools for finding bugs in concurrent software using notions of causal atomicity and serializability, a tool called Getafix that model-checks boolean abstractions of programs using ideas from solving games, and several fundamental results on model-checking recursive and concurrent program abstractions. A current focus is to utilize atomicity properties to detect vulnerabilities in a concurrent system under test.

Current UPCRC Projects: Formal Methods and Tools to Check Correctness

Department: Computer Science

Email: madhu at illinois.edu

Dan Roth

Area(s) of Expertise: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Inference and Optimization, Information Access Technologies

Roth has made significant contributions to the foundations of machine learning and inference and to the theory and practice of developing learning-centered solutions to natural language problems.

Current UPCRC Projects: Natural Language Processing

Department: Computer Science

Email: danr at illinois.edu

Josep Torrellas

Area(s) of Expertise: Computer Architecture and Systems, Hardware Design, Speculative Multithreading, Hardware and Software Reliability, Low-Power Design

Contributed to the DASH and Cedar experimental parallel computer prototypes. Leader of the I-acoma project, which has made seminal contributions on shared-memory multiprocessor organization, memory hierarchies, and thread-level speculation. The I-acoma project was selected as a Point-Design Study by the government to advance the arrival of petaflop architectures. Co-leader of the FlexRAM Intelligent Memory Architecture and the DARPA-IBM PERCS High-Productivity Multiprocessor projects. Other contributions include architectures to tolerate process variation and novel tools to debug parallel programs. Many of his former PhD students are now leaders in academia and industry.

Current UPCRC Projects: Hardware Architecture, The Bulk Multicore

Department: Computer Science

Email: torrella at illinois.edu

Craig Zilles

Area(s) of Expertise: Microarchitecture, Managed Languages, Profiling, Hardware/Software Co-design, Transactional Memory

Zilles' work has demonstrated many techniques for using hardware-software co-design and feedback-directed optimization to optimize performance. Applications range from demonstrating how a multithreaded machine could accelerate a single thread using "helper threads" to prefetch memory and "pre-execute" hard-to-predict branches (ISCA 2001), how a simple transactional memory can be used by a Java virtual machine to perform speculative optimization (ISCA 2007), and to how critical path analysis can be used to mitigate much of the penalty of distributing a sequential execution over a distributed microarchitecture (Micro 2005).

Current UPCRC Projects: Runtime System, Hardware Architecture, DeNovo

Department: Computer Science

Email: zilles at illinois.edu