The design and implementation of a national computing systems grid has become a reachable goal for both computer and computational scientists. In order to better use this suite of resources, consisting of geographically disperse machines, instruments, and data storage, better scheduling and resource management techniques are needed.
This project concentrates on the issue of matching the requirements of an application to the capabilities of a resource or set of resources on the grid. This is often referred to as determining the affinity of an application for a resource. The research will formalize the folklore currently used in order to increase the accessibility of the grid to those application scientists that have less experience than current users. Work will continue in the development of a language specification to describe both applications and resources as needed today, but with the extensibility needed for future applications as well. This will then be used as an indexing structure into a case-based reasoning expert system.
This project also has an extended educational portion to it. As a part of the effort to expand Northwestern's Computer Science education in the systems area and a cross-school initiative, we plan to offer a course in experimental systems using ideas in parallel distributed scheduling as the basis for a larger view into practical systems, experimentation, and teamwork. This project-oriented class will be focused around teaching students about current parallel distributed scheduling efforts and applications.
In addition, a new seminar series will be started featuring women researchers in computer science to help encourage female students to continue with careers in computer science.
