High Performance Computing Lab, Northeastern University

The High Performance Computing Laboratory at Northeastern University is led by Gene Cooperman. The Lab is part of the College of Computer and Information Science and is located at West Village H. As of 2016, it includes three Ph.D. students, a research scientist (Kapil Arya), and assorted M.S. students. The Laboratory is pursuing a variety of projects with an emphasis on checkpointing technologies.

Professor Cooperman has over 100 refereed publications, and has been awarded 15 grants from the National Science Foundation. He is the head of the High Performance Computing Lab at Northeastern University. Prof. Cooperman also holds a five-year appotintment as an IDEX Chair of Attractivity at the Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées and LAAS-CNRS.

Current research direction:

User-Space Checkpointing for Parallel and Distributed Computation:

User-Level Distributed, Multi-Threaded Checkpointing: The user-space approach allows us to bundle the checkpointing capability with the application or with the computational facility, as opposed to kernel-space solutions, which (at least in binary form) are bound to particular versions of the kernel, and therefore to the computational facility. As one expects, we require no modification of kernel or of application binary. We have demonstrated that it works with Open MPI, with MPICH-2, with the Java JVM, and a variety of other applications. Our latest version is DMTCP (available at SourceForge), and is available under LGPL. See the DMTCP web site for further information, or see this recent talk from 2016 on DMTCP..