Orion Sky Lawlor

As cyber-physical systems (CPS) become increasingly a part of our daily life, the need for a well-prepared workforce also becomes evident, calling for new approaches and test-beds to introduce CPS concepts into classrooms at all levels. The literature has many examples of CPS relevant platforms, which are used successfully in research; however, especially the commercial ones are mostly closed-architecture and do not provide an in-depth engagement for the students in all aspects of the hardware and software. This paper introduces a novel platform, known as the AERO-Beam, which conveys many basics of CPS, while also introducing the dynamics and control fundamentals of quadcopters. Quadcopters are widely used in CPS projects, and yet they are either closed-architecture or too complex for use in CPS education. The AERO-Beam addresses the need in many ways, as demonstrated through the multi-level classroom implementation.

We present a high performance in-memory lossless data compression scheme designed to save both memory storage and bandwidth for general sparse matrices. Because the storage hierarchy is increasingly becoming the limiting factor in overall delivered machine performance, this type of data structure compression will become increasingly important. Compared to conventional compressed sparse row (CSR) using 32-bit column indices, compressed column indices (CCI) can be over 90% smaller, yet still be decompressed at tens of gigabytes per second. We present time and space savings for 20 standard sparse matrices, on multicore CPUs and modern GPUs.

This paper presents a novel research-education integration approach that uses the interdisciplinary theme of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to further advance teaching and learning in such systems and related areas, in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and computer science (CS). The primary targeted learners in this emerging area are graduate and undergraduate students of ECE and CS, as well as teachers and students of STEM in high schools, who work together over a common CPS design project, with the graduate and undergraduate students teaching and mentoring the high school students. In the first year of this GK12 project, a networked ground and aerial vehicle based Search and Rescue(S&R) Robotics system is selected as the CPS design project with an associated multi-school competition organized via the use of teleoperation over the Internet. The first year results demonstrated great promise not only in terms of improved learning among students and teachers of multiple disciplines and levels, but also provided valuable hardware and software platforms for on-line experimentation and education in CPS, robotics, graphics and animation, UGV and UAV control, communication and networking.

We present and analyze two new communication libraries, cudaMPI and glMPI, that provide an MPI-like message passing interface to communicate data stored on the graphics cards of a distributed-memory parallel computer. These libraries can help applications that perform general purpose computations on these networked GPU clusters. We explore how to efficiently support both point-to-point and collective communication for either contiguous or noncontiguous data on modern graphics cards. Our software design is informed by a detailed analysis of the actual performance of modern graphics hardware, for which we develop and test a simple but useful performance model.

Many important parallel applications require multiple flows of control to run on a single processor. In this paper, we present a study of four flow-of-control mechanisms: processes, kernel threads, user-level threads and event-driven objects. Through experiments, we demonstrate the practical performance and limitations of these techniques on a variety of platforms. We also examine migration of these flows-of-control with focus on thread migration, which is critical for application-independent dynamic load balancing in parallel computing applications. Thread migration, however, is challenging due to the complexity of both user and system state involved. In this paper, we present several techniques to support migratable threads and compare the performance of these techniques.

Summary form only given. This paper describes a parallel debugger and the related debugging support implemented for CHARM++, a data-driven parallel programming language. Because we build extensive debugging support into the parallel runtime system, applications can be debugged at a very high level.