Research in Physical Geometric Algorithms (PGA) studies computational processes that compute or reason about geometric or spatial relationships in the physical world, and their realization in a variety of application areas. These areas include Robotics, Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), Computational Biology, Scientific and Image Processing, Image Analysis, and Systems Simulation. Collectively, these techniques take on the problems associated with manipulating massive amounts of data associated with a physical system model. Research in PGA pursues the proposition that, for such systems, predictions of behavior, arguments of correctness, and combinatorial precision devolve to a geometric analysis. At interesting scales these areas have in common their exploitation of networks, remote databases, local area clusters, disk farms (both local and remote), parallel processing, and graphics. This project will develop new Systems Science techniques (particularly algorithms, analysis, modeling techniques, and methodology) for addressing latency, bandwidth, security, scalability, scheduling, temporal variation in access, and parallel high-performance computing for these applications.
The equipment provided by this grant enables our application research groups and systems research groups to synergistically develop common system solutions to these critical performance issues, as well as set new directions in both applications and systems problem areas.
