Andrew L Wendelborn

this page is currently under re-development at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/andrew.wendelborn

Dr Andrew L Wendelborn

Department of Computer Science
University of Adelaide, SA 5005
Australia

Email:	andrew@cs.adelaide.edu.au
Web Page:	http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au/~andrew
Phone:	+61-8-8303-4726
Facsimile:	+61-8-8303-4366

Professional

Distributed High Performance Computing (DHPC) Project, Research Data Networks CRC

Parallel functional programming project

Research Interests

Distributed high performance computing
Parallel (functional) programming
Data flow computation
Programming language design

Some current research

[This section is under development]

Distributed Process Networks Project

(Process networks (Kahn semantics) and metacomputing)

This is work carried out currently with my PhD student, Darren Webb, and a visiting INRIA researcher, Julien Vayssiere.

To give the general idea, here is an abstract of a talk I've given recently at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, Uni California at Berkeley, Uni of Southern California, and at the Workshop on Java for Parallel and Distributed Computing (IPPS, Puerto Rico, Apr 1999).

The system described above was implemented by Darren as his Honours project (1997-98). It is now called PAGIS (the name Jade was taken!).

We are now refining the implementation. We're looking especially at representation of process and channel, optimal (dynamic) placement in the distributed system of channel data structures, and scheduling aspects. We use Kahn's process network model as the formal foundation of our work -- we utilize a variety of implementation strategies; by ensuring that each is consistent with this semantics, we can be confident that overall behaviour is independent of implementation strategy. We are undertaking experiments to compare the structure, behaviour and performance of implementations using standard RMI, and using the ProActive Java library for parallel, distributed, and concurrent computing.

Some of the more general issues we are exploring:include:

reconfiguration of a PN to adapt to environmental factors (such as presence of high speed network links);
hierarchy in PNs (for example, a node of a PN representing a metacomputing application might itself be a PN, but with a different "computational engine");
modes of evaluation of the PN, following some of my earlier work on data-driven, demand-driven, and hybrid evaluation schemes, including the use of lenient (non-strict data driven) structures to represent not-yet-computed portions of a result, especially comparison of this notion with the concept of "future" in ProActive.

Here is a recent Summary of Progress and Directions.

JavaF: value-oriented programming in Java

A Java interface beneath which objects represent values, with copy semantics; we use reification to enforce such behaviour transparently. JavaF programs are (compared to full Java) more amenable to analysis, optimization and highly parallel execution; we hope that this will facilitate high performance computation in Java.