Research Interests: High Performance Computing, Bio-inspired Optimization algorithms, Performance Analysis & Optimization.

Dissertation Area: Parallel bio-inspired optimization algorithms for solving combinatorial search problems.

I'm interested in solving high dimensional search problems with underlying topology information that are encountered in certain engineering optimization problems using biologically inspired algorithms. The algorithms could be derived from wide ranging techniques within the class of evolutionary algorithms to neuro-inspired approaches.

A case study currently being investigated is the contaminant source characterization problem in a water distribution system(WDS). This entails finding the contaminant source location as well as the its release pattern over time. A WDS consists of a series of pipes, junctions, tanks & reservoirs forming a connected network. It could be modeled as a weighted directed graph with dynamically updated flow directions and magnitudes based on demand.

Master's thesis: Cyberinfrastructure for Contamination Source Characterization in Water Distribution systems.

Advisors: Dr.G(Kumar)Mahinthakumar (Committee Chair), Dr.Xiaosong Ma (Committee Co-Chair), Dr.Ranji Ranjithan, Dr.Frank Mueller

Publications

Cyberinfrastructure for Threat Management in Water Distribution networks
- National Science Foundation DDDAS (Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems) Project

(Read a outline of the activities in the Cyberinfrastructure section)

Developing a framework for parallel bio-inspired optimization algorithms.

• Investigation of Swarm Intelligence algorithms for solving the contaminant source identification problem.

Porting simulation code to Blue Gene/L and Cray XT4. 

Grid enabled workflow for solving water quality simulations to detect contamination in urban water distribution networks.

• Coarse grain parallelization of water quality simulation code(EPANET)

• Optimization methods using Evolutionary Computing techniques and concepts from Graph Theory.

• Workflow encompassing interactions between the optimization methods and parallelized water quality simulation code.

• Framework for deploying on large scale distributed systems like Teragrid and SURAgrid.

• Performance analysis and optimization.
  

Links:

Secure-Water Project Website

Secure-Water Wiki

Performance Analysis and Optimization of Groundwater application
- Dept. of Energy SciDAC Project (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing)

Performance analysis and optimization of PFLOTRAN, esp on Cray XT4 (Second fastest supercomputer upon its debut in June '07) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This work is part of an ongoing SciDAC PERI project.

Preliminary results indicate an improvement of 18.77% over baseline results on Cray XT4 while running on 4096 cores.

Links: 

Recent Results

Other Projects

Performance Analysis and Tool Evaluation
- Dept. of Energy SciDAC Project (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing)

Analyzing performance of High Performance Computing Applications including performance tool evaluation at several Supercomputing facilities (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Teragrid etc.)

Links: Visit my earlier website for results.

• Performance Analysis of a nuclear fusion application Gyro - Results .
  

• Performance analysis of GenASiS (GENeral Astrophysics SImulation System for the Terascale Supernova Initiative, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) - Results.

• Activities included manual analyis, Profiling and Tracing using parallel performance analysis tools.

• Benchmarking, Scalability analysis and cross platform performance comparison.

• The following tools were used for the performance tool evaluation.

  • TAU : Tuning and Analysis Utilities, SvPablo: A Toolkit for Performance Analysis of Parallel Systems, PerfSuite from NCSA, HPC Toolkit from Rice University, mpiP from LLNL, Other tools from PERC (Performance Evaluation Research Center).
    

Research Cluster (Visit Neptune section for more details)

Neptune is an Opteron Cluster in the Department of Civil Engineering at North Carolina State University and is the primary resource for R&D.

• Planned, configured and deployed the cluster.

• Conducted extensive benchmarking using High performance Linpack(HPL) and Matlab Distributed Computing Toolbox.

• Achieved a peak performance of 76 GFLOPS with HPL(Linpack) while solving a solving a 70K x 70K dense matrix, corresponding to 78% of the theoretical peak.

Presentations

• Performance analysis tools: A guest lecture (ppt) was given on parallel performance analysis and profiling tools for graduate level Parallel Computing course at NCSU.

• Blue Matter (Blue Gene): Class Presentation(ppt, pdf) on the architecture of Blue Gene,the world's fastest supercomputer and Blue Matter, the application framework for molecular simulation on Blue Gene was given as part of PALM research group seminar series at NCSU. 

• Secure Water

• Parallel Applications and Middleware (PALM)

  Other Activities

• Evolutionary Computation (Student Seminars - Fall '06)

• PALM Group Reading Seminar (Fall '05)