Supervisors: Dr. C.L. WANG

I look for one postdoc and 1-2 Ph.D students this year. If you are interested in one of the projects, please contact me at clwang@cs.hku.hk. Interview will be arranged for qualified students in mid September 2011 (early admission) or early March 2011 for regular admission.

1.

Japonica: Transparent Runtime and Memory Coherence Support for GPU Based Heterogeneous Many-Core Architecture, 11/2011-10/2013. (new)

 

In this project, we propose a new runtime platform, called Japonica (Java with Auto-Parallelization ON GraphIcs Coprocessing Architecture), which enables a multithreaded Java program to scale transparently on a GPU-based heterogeneous system. With the transparent runtime support, application developers can utilize both CPU and GPU resources seamlessly with an idiomatic Java programming model. Japonica possesses several unique features: (1) automatic translation from Java bytecode to OpenCL, (2) auto-parallelization of loops with non-deterministic data dependencies, (3) dynamic load scheduling and rebalancing via task migration between CPU and GPU, (4) virtual shared memory between host and device, and (5) speculative coherency protocol for threads running on both CPU and GPU cores. The proposed work explores GPU-friendly ways to support a partial Java heap and STM-based synchronization of shared objects and arrays mirrored in GPU.

 

1 Ph.D student: interested in Java Virtual Machine, Java compiler, software transactional memory. Some experiences in GPU programming is preferred.

 
  Project URL: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~clwang/projects/JESSICA2.html
  Postdoc position: must have strong publication records in the field of parallel&distributed computing. Topics may involve: caching algorithm, data consistency protocol, Java compiling, etc.  Starting date: asap.
   
TrC-STM: An Adaptive Software Transactional Memory Support for Multi-Core Programming
We are now building a word-based software transactional memory system for Multi-Core Programming.
2

Self-Organizing Desktop Cloud (SODC)

We are currently building a P2P Personal Cloud system which heavily adopts the Xen virtual machines. The research focus will be on VM I/O performance isolation, live VM migration over WAN environment.

1 student: good in virtual machines design, such as KVM, Xen, VMWare. All these are related to "virtualization techniques". This research is quite low level. Students require solid background in Linux kernel and VM and computer networking.