Introduction:

The goal of research at the Universal Grid Computing Laboratory (UGC Lab) is to develop a universal grid computing system and architecture which can adapt to large-scale dynamic computing environments, facilitate  application development, and improve runtime performance as well.  The members of the UGC Lab are also interested in recent technology advances in computer science related fields, such as e-science and e-social-science. The current research direction in the UGC Lab focuses on three topics:

• Large-scale distributed programming technology to facilitate worldwide-scale application development

• Generic distributed scientific computing framework

• Peer-to-Peer systems

Current Projects:

Large-Scale Scientific Computing Application, System, and Architecture in Astronomy:
PANoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) is a planned astronomical survey that will conduct astrometry and photometry of 3/4 of the entire sky every night. The major goal of Pan-STARRS is to detect potentially hazardous objects, in particular the near-earth objects in the Solar System. PS1, essentially one quarter of Pan-STARRS, is the prototype of the Pan-STARRS, and is also expected to have significant contribution in many areas of astronomy research. Pan-STARRS is currently operated by the University of Hawaii, which has set up an international consortium comprised of research groups in Germany, the USA, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan. The observed data from PS1 will be about 2-3 Terabytes per night which takes a long time to finish data analysis. Therefore advanced computing technology,  especially grid/p2p computing technology, is required to improve performance. Furthermore, many astronomy applications may also utilize the data from PS1 to do their own analysis, which means there exist many research potentials for universal grid computing in this area. The UGC Lab is collaborating with the Graduate Institute of Astronomy at National Central University, Taiwan, on PS1 related research.

Worldwide Computing Environment (sponsored by NSC, Taiwan, NSC97-2221-E-008-046-):
The purpose of this research is to turn the Internet into a unified, worldwide computing environment, which harnesses under-loaded computing resources by the technique of dynamic system reconfiguration in a peer-to-peer manner. The major testbed and toolkit used in our worldwide computing environment research is Simple Actor Language, System, and Architecture (SALSA), a distributed actor-based programming language which supports actor migration, coordinated asynchronous message execution, automatic actor garbage collection, and universal actor naming. Investigating distributed programming framework on dynamic grids and efficient distributed actor garbage collection are the current concerns of the UGC Lab in this project. The Worldwide Computing Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US is our major collaboration partner in this project.  

Courses:

• Fall 2008: (CE1001A) Introduction to Computer Science I, (CE1003A) Introduction to Computer Science Lab I, (CE5049) Introduction to Grid Computing.
• Spring 2008: (CE1002A) Introduction to Computer Science II, (CE1004A) Introduction to Computer Science Lab II, (CE6132) Advanced Distributed Computing Models.
• Fall 2007: (CE1001A) Introduction to Computer Science I, (CE1003A) Introduction to Computer Science Lab I, (CE5049) Introduction to Grid Computing.

Publication List:

The information can be obtained at Wei-Jen Wang's publication list.