Galois, Inc., a Portland, Oregon computer science R&D company, has been awarded two 2010 Phase I SBIR research awards, and one 2010 Phase 2 award from the US Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, to conduct research into high performance computing infrastructure.
A Deployable, Robust File System for Parallel I/O
When considering high-performance parallel computers, it is easy to overlook the importance of disk storage. In this research, Galois will address the topic of disk storage for parallel computers, and create a deployable, robust file system that will reduce downtime due to faults and increase productivity through improved system performance. Galois’ will take a synthesis approach, combining several strands of existing research on the subject of file systems and transitioning it into a robust, fully-featured product. In doing so, we will utilize modern formal methods research, in the form of model checking, to validate our design and improve the reliability of our implementation. The benefits of this research will be to improve the efficiency and decrease the cost of large, parallel file systems. This work will be applicable to Department of Energy laboratories, as well as to commercial users of massive parallel or distributed storage, such as online storage and backup providers or grid storage providers.This project builds on Galois’ experience with industrial model checking, and our prior work on file system design and implementation via formal methods.
Improved Symbol Resolution for Portable Build Systems
Modern High Performance Computing utilizes a variety of different hardware and software platforms. These differences make it difficult to develop reusable components, which leads to a significant decrease of productivity. This project will investigate the design of portable build systems that are simple, yet sufficiently robust with respect to symbol resolution, so that they are able to adapt and build software across many different platforms. This project will result in increased productivity for software developers who design portable software components. In particular, we anticipate significant benefits in the area of High Performance Computing, where the multitude of different hardware and software platforms make the problem of reusing software particularly acute.This work takes advantage of Galois’ background in domain specific language design, and build systems, in particular, Cabal, and other system configuration software.
Collaboration and Sharing on the Grid
The goal of the “Grid 2.0” project is to improve the ability of a distributed team of researchers to collaborate on research using grid middleware computing infrastructure. In Phase I of this project, we developed a prototype integration of a typical collaboration-oriented web application with an open source data grid middleware system, establishing that such integration is feasible. In Phase II, we directly address the weakest point for collaboration applications on grid systems: open, standardized protocols for identity management, authorization, and delegation on the grid, via a federated identity management system providing support for software authorization and delegation on the Open Science Grid. The intent is to provide a secure, open, and flexible identity management system for use on grid infrastructure projects, portable to other grid middleware systems, and interoperable with existing identity management schemes. The open source results of the research will form the basis for applications of identity management systems in commercial cloud and grid systems.This project builds on Galois’ experience with cross-domain collaboration tools and secure identity management systems (including OpenID, OAuth, SAML and X.509) developed for several clients over the past decade.For more information about these projects, contact Don Stewart (dons@galois.com).