STE||AR Student Wins University Research Award!

Nikunj Gupta, a STE||AR Group GSoC student from 2018 and continued collaborator with our group, has received a Thesis Award from his University, IIT Roorkee, based on his research. 

IIT Roorkee allows students to pursue research in foreign universities (Foreign BTP), wherein the student should have 1 supervisor (IIT Roorkee Prof) and 1 co-supervisor, the professor under which the student pursues research. Dr. Hartmut Kaiser introduced Nikunj to Prof. Sanjay Laxmikant V. Kale, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the purposes of this project. Dr. Kale interviewed Nikunj and agreed to provide a research internship from Sept-Dec. Nikunj proposed this research as Foreign BTP to his University and was accepted. 

After completion of his research internship, Nikunj received an award for his project during his University’s Convocation Ceremony held on Sept 11, 2021.

The details of the project, provided by Nikunj, and are below.  Congratulations, Nikunj!  We are proud of the work you do.

Sept-Dec:

I worked with Sanjay on part 1 of my thesis, which was to write abstractions over Charm++ to generate a linear algebra library. The salient features of this library were out-of-order execution, completely asynchronous operations and almost linear distributed scaling. As a future work, I decided to optimize the library (something I’m doing right now as a graduate student here at UIUC) and to generate a frontend language that has a MATLAB like syntax.

Jan-June:

I felt that I could add more to my thesis to make it stronger, so I decided to add my resilience work to it. I contacted Hartmut regarding resiliency work to which he agreed. The work was to implement resilience execution spaces in Kokkos. I created Kokkos executors for HPX to use Kokkos facilities to achieve resilience within HPX and also added resilience execution spaces in Kokkos to achieve resilience within Kokkos. The resilience scheme within Kokkos is an auto-generative scheme that will work with all current and future execution spaces. I also included my past work with resilience in my thesis. So, the work I did back in Summer 2019 and Summer 2020 was included in my thesis too. In Summer 2019, I worked on implementing Local-Only Software Resilience in HPX which I extended to Distributed Software Resilience in Summer 2020. The resilience work has also been published last year at the FTXS workshop in Supercomputing titled “Towards distributed software resilience in asynchronous many-task programming models”. We plan on writing a paper on the Kokkos resilient execution space as well!

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