Michael Scott - US grants

The support provided by this award will assist the Rochester researchers to pursue the goal of real-time active vision. Based on their experience with parallel vision algorithms on both general and special purpose hardware, they will move to the next stage: integration of parallel solutions to individual problems into a unified solution to a single complex problem. To facilitate this research the award will help them develop a parallel laboratory for real-time vision consisting of four key components: a "head," containing cameras for visual input, a robot arm or "neck" that supports and moves the "head," a special purpose parallel processor for high-bandwidth, low-level vision processing, and a general purpose parallel processor for high-level vision and planning. New research directions that will be investigated using the laboratory include heterogeneous parallelism, hierarchical adaptive control for sensory-motor systems, cooperation of symbolic planning with real-world action, operating systems for sealable MIMD architectures, and parallel programming environments. The laboratory will also serve to unify research in massively parallel architectures, vision, planning, robotics, and parallel software systems.

The state of the art in parallel programming is characterized by a wide variety of process models, communication mechanisms, and patterns of sharing and protection. Experience suggests that no single model of parallelism will suffice in every case. Unfortunately, traditional operating systems tend to enforce a single model by embedding it in the kernel. Overcoming this limitation is the principal goal of the Psyche operating system. It is expected that Psyche will allow each programmer to use the most appropriate model for the task at hand, and will open up previously unavailable opportunities to use multiple models within a single application. This research focuses on Psyche as a testbed for multi-model parallel computing -- evaluating the extent to which the Psyche user interface makes multi-model programming possible, and determining the sorts of user-level tools, techniques, and conventions that are required to make it practical. Building on an existing multiprocessor implementation of Psyche, progressively more complicated user-level programs, beginning with coexisting but independent models of parallelism and working up to system servers that can interact with many kinds of clients, and applications that use more than one model of parallelism internally will be used in experiments. In the later phases of this work, expertise in our department's computer vision, robotics, and planning groups will be drawn on for the construction of large, multi-model reactive applications.

9319445 Scott The goal of this research is to develop and evaluate synchronization techniques on very large scale shared memory mutliprocessor systems. With increases in size and availability of parallel processors, high-performance synchronization has become a critical factor in overall application performance and scalability. Among the techniques for synchronization include special-purpose hardware, active messages, lock-free data structures, and scalable software synchronization algorithms based on atomic fetch-and-o instructions. The choice of the synchronization approach plays a significant role on the overall performance. The PI proposes to concentrate his research on 1)comparative evaluation of software synchronization, lock- free data structures, active messages and special-purpose hardware primitives, 2)new synchronization algorithms that scale with the number of processors and utilize the available atomic instructions, and 3) new mechanisms for cooperative synchronization and scheduling which minimize the unnecessary spinning on locks, maximize processor locality and avoid contention for both lock and nonlock data. ***

9401142 LeBlanc This award provides support for the establishment of a laboratory that uses two types of simulation technologies in the design of visually controlled robotics systems. The first type of simulation technology is the simulation of sensory interaction with physical environments, popularly known as "virtual reality". Virtual reality can replace the real world in testing and debugging a system. The second is execution-driven simulation of complex parallel algorithms at the level of individual messages and memory accesses, which can address the performance and low-level real-time problems of interacting processes. The experimental facilities requested include a Silicon Graphics Reality (SGI) Engine for scene generation in the simulated world, an upgrade of an existing SGI Challenge multiprocessor for simulation of the virtual world and control software, a computational engine for performing real-time intermediate to high-level vision, a hydraulic robot arm for real-time manipulation, a small-scale multi-processor for device control and medium-level vision, and general purpose workstations. The focus of the proposal is the development of simulations to aid in the development of real-world robotic systems. Research topics to be explored include the development of principles for constructing complex physical autonomous systems; the development of new modes of simulation for virtual reality, and simulation and implementation of robotic control algorithms.

This award is made to Dr. Russell S. Drago of the Chemistry Department, University of Florida, for investigation of a new method to measure and control the acidity of solid acid catalysts. The award is in the Technology for Sustainable Environment component of the EPA/NSF Partnership for Environmental Research, and support is provided by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. Solid acid catalysts substituted for strong acid solvents and reagents can reduce toxic wastes associated with many industrial processes, such as alkylation, that require sulfuric acid or hydrofluoric acid to promote reaction. Results of calorimetric titrations and adsorption isotherms will be used to determine equilibrium constants and enthalpies for various reaction sites on the solids. When coupled with spectroscopic and reactivity data, reaction thresholds and optimum solid acidities will be determined for reactions of interest. Sol-gel methods will be used to prepare a series of solid acids that incorporate different high oxidation state elements into the silica structure. The effect of element changes and systematic changes in the synthesis variables on acidity will be determined and correlated with selectivity of various solid acid catalysts for isomerization of alkanes. Non-porous and microporous solids with similar acid strengths will be compared. The petroleum industry uses hydrofluoric and sulfuric acids to initiate many reactions that alter the arrangement or length of molecular carbon chains. Solid acids that can replace these aqueous acids provide inexpensive and reusable substitutes in many areas of refining. In this study, a systematic approach to assessing the effectiveness of solid acids in various reactions will be developed.

Efficiently supporting shared memory on top of commodity hardware is one of the greatest challenges to widespread acceptance of parallel computing. Coherence is the central problem: data in a large-scale system must be replicated and kept near to the processors that use them, but changes must be communicated to all of the copies. This research addresses this problem through a distinctive combination of software and low-cost hardware, and through an active integration of "behavior-driven" coherence protocols with compiler-based program analysis. Applications to be studied include collaborative work with researchers in Economics, Biology, Radiology, Genetics, data mining, computer vision, and virtual reality. The hardware base for the research is a cluster of eight multiprocessors (32 processors total) acquired under a collaborative agreement with Digital Equipment Corporation, and connected by DEC's new Memory Channel network. By directly accessing remote memory, the network allows processors to interact two orders of magnitude faster than they can in comparable systems. Software coherence protocols can exploit this fast communication to maintain directories, implement synchronization, and avoid interrupting the work of remote processors. The ultimate goal of the research is to obtain supercomputer performance for both traditional and emerging applications on networks of commodity machines.

EIA-9972881
Randal C. Nelson
Christopher M. Brown
Sandhya Dwarkadas
Kiriakos N. Kutulakos
Michael L. Scott
University of Rochester

CISE Research Infrastructure: A Laboratory for Intelligent Multi-Sense Interfaces

University of Rochester researchers will conduct research and pilot studies in ubiquitous visual computing. The theme of their work is using high performance networking to connect devices that provide and use images in compute intensive settings. Researchers will establish a protocol that can ship images and video transparently between workstations and the computational cluster. Another project will implement a dataflow image computation model.

With this award, the Chemistry Division supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site directed by Drs. Randolph S. Duran and Michael Scott in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida. The ten participants, recruited nationally, will take part in projects involving a bio- and materials Chemistry research focus. The undergraduates will have the unique opportunity of interacting with ten French undergraduates who are present as part of a broader REU effort in the department. In addition, interactions with students from the Engineering Center for Particle Science and Technology (ERC) in Gainesville and the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL) in Orlando will be arranged. Student research findings are summarized in a journal-style report and the participants are encouraged to present their work verbally during the course of the program and, later, at the Florida Section meeting of the American Chemical Society.

This CAREER award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program supports research and education on structurally defined ligands by Dr. Michael Scott of the Chemistry Department, University of Florida. A new class of tripodal aryloxide ligands with a preorganized bowl-like shape will be synthesized. The ligands can be adjusted by chemical modification to selectively bind various metal ions or to alter their reactivity. Some of the ligands are sufficiently rigid that they can be used in the assembly of supramolecular structures containing metal ions. The ligands have three binding sites and so binding of more than one metal center to the ligand backbone is possible, yet oligomerization is inhibited.

Compounds containing aluminum will be prepared which will be useful as robust catalysts for alkylations, cycloadditions and many other chemical reactions. Undergraduate students involved in the project will learn about molecular recognition and catalysis, in addition to skills in synthesis and characterization. The educational component of this CAREER Award will focus on developing a course in inorganic biochemistry for biochemistry students and on offering an undergraduate research course in the department.

9978858
Sacks
Approximately 60,000 mechanical prosthetic or bioprosthetic heart valves (BHV) are annually implanted in the United States. BHV have excellent hemodynamics and generally do not require the anti-coagulation therapy necessary for mechanical heart valves. Our long-term goal is the development of rigorous engineering principals for improving replacement heart valves. However, BHV continue to fail 8-10 years after implantation from calcification and mechanical damage. Many studies have demonstrated that maintaining tissue structural integrity is a prime factor in extending durability. Nevertheless, while much research has focused on chemical treatment technologies to reduce mineralization, little work has been done on understanding the mechanisms underlying non-calcific mechanical damage.

The goal of this research will be to develop a better understanding of the mechanical fatigue damage behavior of bioprosthetic heart valve biomaterials. We will utilize a rigorous experimental testing protocol to evaluate of the onset, mode, and progression of chemically treated BHV tissue damage under cyclic loading conditions. Based on this data, we will develop a fatigue damage model to clarify and relate the relative impact of different structural changes, such as fiber debonding and fiber weakening, to changes in macro-level tissue mechanical properties. The fatigue damage model will ultimately serve as a guide for the development of key experiments for fatigue damage assessment of novel chemical treatment technologies. This will aid in the rational development, as opposed to the current ad-hoc approach, of novel chemically modified collagenous biomaterials for more durable cardiac valve bioprostheses.

During each year, one graduate student will spend four months at Baxter engaging in direct industrial collaboration with Baxter scientists. The goal of this interaction to gain insight on how the results of this study can be applied to BHV biomaterial development. Specifically, this student will 1) gain insight as to what critical fatigue damage issues need to be addressed by the heart valve industry, 2) begin utilization of our results toward solving these issues, and 3) improve Baxter's general core competence in biomechanical testing of BHV soft tissues. Next, a Baxter research scientist will spend approximately one month during each project year to visit our labs to consult with our team. This scientist will work closely to advise the theoretical/modeling work and provide guidance on how results can contribute most effectively to product improvements. In addition, during these visits this scientist will give lectures to engineering students on challenges facing the biomedical device industry.

The explosive growth of both large and small scale distributed systems is leading to a host of new applications, most of which employ some notion of distributed shared state: information required
at more than one location. Building on the experience of the PIs, this research will develop convenient, efficient middleware for applications running on heterogeneous platforms. The goal is to dramatically reduce the programmer effort required to develop distributed applications, and in particular to make it as easy to run applications on a local-area cluster as it is to to run them on
a shared-memory multiprocessor. The proposed research will therefore employ a shared-memory programming model. The PIs will extend their previous work in software distributed shared memory (S-DSM) to accommodate heterogeneous languages and machine types,
and to transparently provide shared state for independently-deployed processes. They will introduce application-specific notions of when a cached copy of data is ``recent enough'' to use, thereby facilitating optimized communication in more globally distributed environments.

The applications driving the research include both scientific simulations and codes developed by local colleagues in the areas of datamining and intelligent multi-sense environments.
The research will facilitate the effective distribution of these applications across the resources they require.

EIA-0080124
Nelson, Randal C.
University of Rochester

CISE Research Infrastructure: Spatial Intelligence for Computer-Enhanced Interaction with Physical Environments

Intelligent computer systems have considerable potential to augment human abilities, not only in accessing abstracted information, but also in dealing with physical environments (both real and virtual). A canonical example of such a system, though certainly not the only one, is a robot with which one can converse. To mediate between people and a physical environment, an intelligent system must perceive spatial structure of various sorts and competently execute physical actions. At the same time, it must communicate with human users to provide information, accept instruction, or assist interactively with complex tasks.

The term "spatial intelligence" can be used to capture the overarching ability to perceive, act in, and communicate about a physical environment. Implementing spatial intelligence depends on integrating a variety of enabling technologies in AI, distributed systems, and human interfaces. Some of the most critical of these technologies, particularly in machine perception and natural language communication are currently crossing a threshold that promises to make useful, end-to-end, spatially intelligent systems viable for the first time.

The overall goal of the project is to enable creation of flexible spatial intelligence with which human users can interact naturally to carry out a variety of collaborative tasks. The project will create and equip a laboratory resource specifically designed to advance the state of the art in the various enabling technologies, and facilitate and demonstrate their integration into end-to-end systems.

This joint Chemistry Division and Division of International Programs award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Florida. Randolph Duran is the site's Program Director; Michael Scott is the Co-Program Director. Over twenty faculty from French institutions are available to serve as REU mentors for U.S. students. During the award period (2001-2003), each summer ten students will travel to France to participate in a 10-12 week program at several French institutions, including Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, University Montpellier, CNRS National Laboratory, and University of Strasbourg. (Note: Through French funding, a similar number of French students, recruited from the same institutions, will be doing summer research at the University of Florida.) Recruitment efforts will extend nationwide, targeting more then 80 institutions with noted minority enrollments. The research topics for the students will center on materials chemistry. A mid-program science workshop will afford students the opportunity to hear one or two lectures on a focused topic and to interact scientifically. The student participants will see research performed in a different manner and within a different cultural context from the traditional U.S. model. Student participants will conclude the program with a project summary presentation at the French institution where the research is being done. An enhanced evaluation of the program will be a longitudinal study via interviews and surveys aimed at examining the impact the international experience has on students' career choices and cultural attitudes.

James Boncella (University of Florida) is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for his work with early transition metal imido/amido compounds. The presence of several pi donors in the coordination sphere and the two electron change between M(IV) and M(VI), where M= Mo or W, provide an opportunity for unusual reactivity. Complexes such as (N,N-bis(trimethylsilyl)-o-phenylenediamide)M(=NPh)(arene) show olefin polymerization and hydrogenation activity. The arylimido and -amido ligands will be modified to determine the effects on bonding and reactivity, particularly oxidative addition. The complexes will also be used to model hydrodesulfurization using sulfur-containing substrates such as thiophene and hydrodeoxygenation chemistry using oxygenated aromatics.

This fundamental study will explore the effects of subtle changes in a metal complex. Study of these organometallic species may lead to a new understanding of industrial processes such as olefin polymerization, hydrogenation, hydrodesulfurization and hydrodeoxygenation.

The objective of this proposal is the meaningful integration of advanced computing knowledge and techniques into the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum. The vehicle for this integration is the creation of an innovative and engaging advanced computing track or specialization for mechanical engineering students. The first implementation will be at the University of Illinois at Chicago; however, the project will be developed for portability, so that deliverables, especially a new capstone course, will greatly aid other schools in implementing curricular changes tailored to their particular needs. It will thus impact students well beyond the UIC campus.

The project is motivated by the lasting roles that computing and information technologies have claimed in mechanical engineering: embedded microprocessors have become commonplace in engineered systems, and the enterprise of engineering design and testing have been migrating to virtual and simulated environments. These trends underscore the fact that good computing practice is becoming as important to engineers as good laboratory practice and sound mathematics.

The proposal addresses the fact that the undergraduate engineer's training in programming has evolved little over the last few decades. And, while students are being exposed to powerful commercial software tools at an increasing rate, the underlying fundamental computational principles are generally overlooked.

The proposed project may be summarized by the following list of outcomes, which will be assessed by an independent evaluator to determine if the activity is a success:

Outcome # 1: Instill advanced computing and programming skills. Mechanical engineering students will learn skills and concepts that are normally only taught to computer scientists: object-oriented programming, data structures, algorithm design, graphical interfaces, large scale scientific computing, and more. A capstone course, which constitutes the centerpiece of the proposal, will integrate the computer science topics with mechanical engineering science and mechanical engineering design.

Outcome # 2: Develop better engineers. Although students will be learning computer science, the goal is to make them better engineers. Since engineers can only use what they know, the investigators hypothesize that these students will be better equipped for the information age, recognizing how IT tools and concepts can be used and exploited in the design of mechanical and thermal/fluid devices and systems.

Outcome #3: Engage minority middle school students. The investigators capitalize on great opportunities for middle school students to participate in the project in a meaningful way: as pilots of virtual aircraft the undergraduates design. The students are exposed to the exciting world of engineering, learning the important roles of high-level mathematics and physics.

Outcome #4: Create a portable product. The final objective of the project is to create a deliverable: the foundation for an advanced computing track that mechanical engineering departments at other institutions may adopt and adapt to suit their own purposes with relative ease and little cost. The capstone course, in particular, can be used for this purpose. We shall produce a considerable amount of software infrastructure and educational materials to distribute freely over the web and we have a strategy to publicize it.

The investigators' areas of expertise span much of the broad discipline of mechanical engineering. The team is complemented by a computer scientist, a specialist in software engineering. They are well-positioned to create the valuable educational experience for mechanical engineering undergraduates at UIC and beyond.
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This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Florida. Randolph Duran is the site's Program Director and Benjamin Smith is the Co-Program Director. Thirty faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period (2002-2004), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. In addition to the recruiting efforts used in the past, a partnership will be established with Tuskegee University to identify additional underrepresented minority students. The students will live and interact with French undergraduate students, as part of their experience. The research focus is a biological and materials chemistry. Students will participate in weekly seminars and will present their research results in the form of papers, talks, and/or posters. There will be a three-day weekend post-REU meeting and poster session each October after the program ends. Students will be surveyed several times throughout the summer program and research mentors provide evaluations of each student at the conclusion of the program. All students are tracked after the program ends.

Multiprocessor systems use synchronization primitives to coordinate the
activities of multiple threads of control. Spin locks in particular are
widely used in multiprocessor operating systems and in scientific
appliactions. With the proliferation of multiprocessor servers, these
locks have come to be widely used in commercial applications as well.
The multiprogrammed nature of server workloads, however, requires that
threads be able to "time out" and abandon an attempt to acquire a lock.
Timeout is easy on small machines, which can use traditional
"test-and-set" spin locks, but these locks do not scale to large
machines. The principal alternative--scheduler-based locks such as
those provided by Java--has also proven to be prohibitively expensive.

The proposed research aims to address the cost of user-level
synchronization in multiprocessor servers by means of two principal
techniques: (1) the incorporation of timeout in scalable queue-based
locks, and (2) the development of practical mechanisms for the
construction of lock-free data structures. These techniques will be
evaluated with respect to each other and to existing techniques, and
will be incorporated into threaded run-time systems such as the Java
Virtual Machine.

The Nineteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles will be held at Bolton's
Landing, Lake George, New York, October 19-22, 2003. For over 30 years SOSP has been the
leading forum for innovative research in operating systems. Like its predecessors, SOSP
2003 will bring together researchers from around the world to present and discuss the
latest results. In addition to such traditional topics as the performance, functionality,
and security of kernels, file systems, and networks, this year's conference will place
increasing attention on such emerging topics as ubiquitous and mobile computing, sensor
networks, overlay and peer-to-peer communications, and power management. Particularly
noteworthy papers will be forwarded to ACM Transactions on Computer Systems for possible
journal publication. There will also be poster and work-in-progress sessions for the
presentation of promising preliminary work.
This proposal requests funding to support the attendance of 20 US-based graduate students.
Participation in leading conferences is an extremely important part of the graduate
school experience, providing the opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and
to be exposed to leading edge work. The support requested in this proposal will make
possible the participation of students who would otherwise be unable to attend.

This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Michael Scott at the University of Florida to develop nitrogen donor ligands with the ability to hold metal ions in proximity to foster cooperativity during catalysis and to mimic metalloenzyme active sites. Amino acid groups will be incorporated onto the triphenoxymethane platform and these constructs will be used for both reactivity and binding studies. In analogy to the trinuclear metal catalysts found in multi-copper oxidases and metallophosphatases, several different examples of trinuclear Zn(II), Cu(II), and Cu(I) compounds will be synthesized. Using the triphenoxymethanes, an effort is also underway to build small ligands with three peptide arms. When amino acid groups are attached to triphenoxymethanes, the platform engenders a high degree of solubility and favorable intra-arm hydrogen-bonding contacts and the pre-organization of the groups to facilitate the binding of metals to the three arms and impart the important properties of chiral amino acids onto the metal centers. These same ligands will also be used to prepare trimetallic catalysts for the hydrolysis of phosphate esters such as RNA, since sequence selective catalysts for RNA hydrolysis have many important potential applications in in vitro and in vivo gene technology.

Functional models will be developed for multi-copper oxidases, which are an extremely important family of oxygen-utilizing enzymes that are primarily found in higher order eukaryotic cells, especially plants, fungi, and vertebrates, and all are used for single electron oxidations of substrates. Students will develop a strong background in both organic and inorganic synthesis and characterization methods and will also become skilled at the collection and refinement of crystallographic data. A collaboration to increase the participation of female students and students from historically black colleges in the undergraduate and graduate research programs at the University of Florida allows faculty and students from Lincoln University to participate in this research during the summer. The students in the normal REU programs administered by the PI, both French and American, also will be involved in this research during their three-month summer stay.

This joint award from the Chemistry Education Program and the Western Europe Program, Office of International Science and Engineering, supports the continuation of an international Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Florida. Randolph Duran and Michael Scott provide leadership for the site. Over twenty faculty from French institutions are available to serve as REU mentors for U.S. students. During the award period (2004-2007), each summer ten students will travel to France to participate in a 10-12 week program at a French research institution, including Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, University Montpellier, CNRS National Laboratory, and University of Strasbourg. Through French funding, a similar number of French students, recruited from the same institutions, will be doing summer research at the University of Florida. Recruitment for REU student researchers will extend nationwide. The research topics for the students will center on materials chemistry. A mid-program science workshop will afford students the opportunity to hear one or two lectures on a focused topic and to interact scientifically. Student participants will conclude the program with a project summary presentation at the French institution where the research is being done and a science workshop at the University of Florida the following fall. By participating in this international REU site, the undergraduates will see research performed in a different manner and within a different cultural context from the traditional U.S. model. An enhanced evaluation of the program will be a longitudinal study via interviews and surveys aimed at examining the impact the international experience has on students' career choices and cultural attitudes. A chemistry faculty member from Lincoln University will also spend the summer in France to facilitate the students' integration into their host research group and serve as a mentor.

National Science Foundation
Distributed Systems Research
CISE/CNS


ABSTRACT

PROPOSAL NUMBER: 0411127
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Dwarkadas, Sandhya
INSTITUTION: University of Rochester
PROPOSAL TITLE: Operating System Strategies for Energy- and Re-source-Aware Adaptation

With increases in device capabilities, energy consumption has emerged as a large and growing concern for both mobile and server-class computers. Hard-ware designers have responded by developing devices (e.g. hard disks and net-works) that can be "powered down" (dropped into a non-operational mode) when inactive, and other devices (e.g. processor components) that can be "scaled back" (by reducing voltage or reallocating in part to other threads), to operate below their peak performance and power. To utilize such devices effectively, the operating system must dynamically "shape" the offered load. For "power down" devices it should aim for burstiness, to maximize the length of low-power inter-vals and minimize the number of costly state transitions. For "scale back" de-vices it should aim for smoothness, to leverage the nonlinear dependence of power on voltage and to avoid paying for unutilized resources. For devices with both capabilities it must balance the benefits of the two approaches.

Work is addressing both existing and emerging architectures, including single-threaded, multi-threaded, and clustered processors. Expected results include (1) the characterization of server and mobile workloads in terms of behavior variability and (2) scheduler and device management strategies that combine run-time instrumentation with profiles of past behavior to model the needs of all running applications, and to match those needs to available resources. Dis-semination will be achieved via publications, students, open source software tools, and/or industry collaboration. Broader impacts will include the re-source-aware adaptation of future increasingly complex systems for improved performance and reduced energy.

Dr. Brett D. Fleisch
Program Director, CISE/CNS
June 16, 2004.
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All major microprocessor vendors are now committed to multi-threaded and
multi-core processors, which make thread-level parallelism visible to
the application programmer. A growing consensus holds that traditional
lock-based programming techniques are inadequate to program these
machines, and that transactions are the most promising alternative. The
central goal of the project is to chart a viable transition path to
future transactional systems. This goal encompasses work on (1)
semantic extensions, including exceptions, conditions, nesting,
irreversible operations, and interoperability; (2) characterization and
minimization of the costs of software transactions; (3) development of
hardware assists; and (4) fast ad-hoc nonblocking data structures that
interoperate with transactions. Work on these fronts spans the
compiler, run-time system, OS kernel, and high-level hardware
architecture, with an emphasis on the run-time level. Expected impacts
and outcomes include a high-performance, open-source, library-level
implementation of transactional memory; high-performance nonblocking
data structures for standard language libraries (examples have already
been adopted for the standard release of Java); a deeper understanding
of transactional semantics, and of the relationships among transactions,
locks, and nonblocking data structures; new hardware implementation
techniques; and appropriate compiler support. More broadly, a
comprehensive roadmap for transactional memory holds the promise of
extending Moore's Law and the IT revolution through the coming decade,
with wide-ranging benefits for science, commerce, government, and
quality of life.

This award by the Chemistry Division supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Florida for the summers of 2006-2008. The program director is Randy Duran who is assisted by co-PI David Evans. Ten students each year will do research in biology and chemistry interpreted in the broadest possible sense. Participants in this REU Site typically spend 10-12 weeks during the summer conducting research on an independent project in a chemistry-related area with a goal of achieving enough progress to merit co-authorship on a scientific publication. Each fall, the students return to Florida to participate in a poster session with students from the US/France and National High Magnetic Field Laboratory REU sites. These interactions serve as a capstone experience for participants, providing them the opportunity to disseminate their research results to a broader peer audience in preparation for possible presentations at the spring national ACS meeting. Recruiting efforts for this program focus on students from throughout the United States with backgrounds in chemistry, biology, zoology, engineering, biochemistry, or physics.

The on-going shift in processor technology to favor multicore
multiprocessors is opening new opportunities for software speculation,
where program code is speculatively executed to improve speed at the
cost of having to monitor for errors and the risk of having to
re-execute code when an error happens.

This project develops a new, behavior-based approach, which allows a
user or a profiling tool to parallelize or optimize a program based on
partial information about the program code and the input. It mainly
develops two programming techniques: Behavior-oriented parallelization
(BOP), which speculatively executes possibly parallel regions, and
Fast track, which uses software speculation to support the use of
unsafely optimized code.

The exponential increase in microprocessor performance over the past
30 years has had incalculable impact on science, commerce, government,
and quality of life. Continuing this revolution through the coming
decade will depend on a large degree of processor-level parallelism.
Behavior-based oftware speculation promises to improve the performance
of existing, sequential software and of new software that reuses an
existing code base. It simplifies parallelization and should thus
improve the productivity of future software development. The outcome
of this proposal will be a suite of techniques for general-purpose
software, and new tools that will be transitioned to industrial
partners wherever possible, and will be used in both undergraduate and
graduate courses.

This project provides support for a workshop in Paris of Fall 2007 to discuss the formation of a new Franco-American Doctoral Network. The goal of this network is the large-scale exchange of doctoral students between the U.S. and France in the subject areas of energy and sustainability. The U.S. principal investigator is Michael Scott of University of Florida, and the two co-PIs are Melanie Loots from UIUC and Steven McLaughlin from Georgia Tech. The French collaborators are the Conference des Presidents d'Universites, the official National Council of French Universities.

The primary goals of this workshop are to: establish a concrete set of objectives and outcomes for the Doctoral Network; obtain commitments from all participating U.S. and French institutions to facilitate the goal of starting the Doctoral Network in Fall 2008; establish the administrative and financial structure of the network; establish an operational framework for the network to include semiannual workshops and language and cultural resources for the students.

This doctoral network plans to leverage the research and educational strengths in the U.S. and France while strengthening research and institutional ties between the two countries. It will likely provide an outstanding international experience for U.S. students to help create a globally-engaged scientific workforce. The network also plans to include a formal assessment program that will study the impact of international co-advising of students, which can be used to inform other networks, and will actively work to increase the number of underrepresented minorities who have international research experiences.

CCF-CPA: Communication and Synchronization Mechanisms for Emerging
Multi-Core Processors
Sandhya Dwarkadas and Michael L. Scott
March 2007


As a result of increasing chip density and power limitations, explicit hardware parallelism will soon dominate the computing spectrum, with multicore chips replacing uniprocessors throughout the desktop and
laptop markets. If these chips are to be used effectively, new programming models must ease the task of writing multithreaded code. These models must in turn be supported by architectural mechanisms that
minimize the cost of data communication and synchronization.

The sponsored research addresses the challenge of mainstream parallelism using a combined hardware-software approach. The key idea is to identify common time-critical operations, across a variety of applications and programming models, that might be accelerated or simplified by new architectural mechanisms, and then to design those mechanisms in as general a fashion as possible. By leaving policy to
software whenever possible, this strategy aims to maximize opportunities for adaptive and application-specific protocols that increase scalability. Candidate hardware mechanisms include alert-on-update, which leverages cache coherence for fast event-based communication; programmable data isolation, which allows a processor to hide local writes for speculation and transactions; and adaptive cooperative caching, which re-engineers the on-chip coherence protocol to accommodate different patterns of data sharing and to communicate values efficiently between cores. These mechanisms will be studied mainly at the hardware level, but system software will also be developed to support new programming models (transactions, speculation) and to enable detailed evaluation of performance and programmability.

Through better parallel programming models and efficient implementations, the sponsored research aims to continue the computing revolution over the course of the coming decade. By enabling the effective use of larger numbers of simpler cores, it also addresses the critical need to reduce energy consumption in mainstream processors. Driving applications will be drawn from multiple sources, including collaborative efforts with University colleagues in Biology, Astrophysics, and Chemistry; department colleagues in Artificial Intelligence and Internet services; and local and remote colleagues in data mining. Programming models and tasks will include transactional computing, speculative execution, and performance and correctness debugging.

This award from the Division of Chemistry (CHE), with co-funding from the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE), supports the renewal of an international Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site between the University of Florida (UF) and France for the summers of 2008-2010. This renewal brings in new directions for the program through collaborations with Furman University (FU) and Morehouse College (MC), two primarily undergraduate institutions. The U.S. program will be under the overall direction of Randolph Duran of UF and the French program under the overall direction of Catherine Grosdemange of the Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France. Duran will be assisted by Michael Scott of UF and Timothy Hanks, Site director at FU, in the administration and coordination of the U.S. students. Ten junior or senior undergraduates each summer will travel to France to participate in a twelve week program in research laboratories in a network of institutions in 8-10 different French cities. This program is set up as a bilateral exchange and an equivalent number of French students will be brought to the University of Florida and Furman University over a 16 week period and fully integrated into the domestic REU Sites at these institutions. The U.S. students will each spend the vast majority of their summer in "science immersion" distributed in groups of 2-4 students per French city over 3-4 different locations each year. The main scientific focus of most of the participating laboratories is materials chemistry. A three-day weekend post-REU meeting and poster session each October after the program ends will be held at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The pilot program has a goal to develop international research experiences for Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) students. As such a Discovery and Innovation Center for International Undergraduate Research Experiences (LSAMP-INT) will be initiated. In this pilot, 16 participants will be recruited from LSAMP programs nationwide. These participants will be given deep immersion experiences in a variety of renowed research laboratories around the world. In particular, the students will be embedded in international (REU) Sites (iREU). About half of the participants will be sent to a set of primary iREU Sites involving France, Brazil, Argentina, and Ghana that are coordinated by the PIs through the University of Florida. The other half of the participants will be embedded in about 18 other iREU Sites that span much of the world and represent most directorates of NSF depending on the experience and interest of the LSAMP student participants.

The cohort of students will share common predeparture and post-program experiences designed to maximize the broader impact of their international research experience. In particular, scientists at the Smithsonian and Florida Museum of Natural History will participate in the pilot program to enhance students' ability to communicate research to the public impacting public understanding of science.

The pilot year will be the pre-cursor to a multi-year program to aid in the development of a diverse workforce with global science competencies critical to continued U. S. competitiveness.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Obesity has become one of the most pressing public health issues of the current century. Unfortunately, tackling the high incidence of obesity is proving to be extremely difficult. Recent evidence suggests the brains of obese individuals resemble those of people addicted to drugs of abuse, with alterations in dopaminergic neurotransmission, arguing that cessation of over eating may be as difficult as abstaining from drug use. Consequently, elucidating the neural circuits that are involved in both the drive to consume high calorie foods and drugs of abuse is extremely important in the development of therapeutic strategies in the treatment of obesity and drug addiction. The proposed experiments examine, using mouse genetic models, the direct action of two potent metabolic signaling proteins, leptin and orexin, on neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and their control of energy homeostasis and modulation of the reinforcing properties of food and cocaine. VTA dopaminergic neurons, projecting to forebrain structures such as the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex, are involved in mediating many of the behavioral responses to drugs of abuse. Interestingly, evidence suggests that VTA dopamine neurons are excited by orexin and inhibited by leptin. Thus, these metabolic signals may act in the VTA to modulate energy homeostasis along with the seeking of both drug and natural food rewards. In Aim 1, lepr will be deleted from mouse VTA neurons, using the Cre-lox system, to test the necessity of lepr signalling while in aim 2, a lepr allele that can be selectively reactivated on a null lepr background in the VTA will be used to test the sufficiency of VTA leptin signalling in regulating energy homeostasis and the reinforcing properties of food and cocaine. In Aim 3, mice carrying a mutant orexin 1 receptor allele that can be reactivated in the VTA on an orexin 1 receptor null background, similar to the leptin reactivatable receptor model, will be used to test the sufficency of orexin action in the VTA in modulating both energy homeostasis and the reinforcing properties of food and cocaine. In summary, the proposed studies will comprehensively test the action of orexin and leptin in the VTA and their subsequent effect on the development of obesity and the drive to consume both food and the psychostimulant cocaine. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed studies will greatly increase our understanding of the mechanisms underlying drug addiction and the drive to consume calorie dense food. The study findings will provide valuble information with which to develop treatment strategies for the prevention of drug use and consumption of calorie dense food.

This award is funded under the American recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)

The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to develop analytic sensitivity methods for numerical simulations of fluid-structure interaction. The sensitivity methods can be employed in the design and assessment of coastal structures. It is also need in reliability and optimization applications for performance-based engineering. The research approach is based on direct differentiation of the equations that govern the particle finite element method, followed by numerical verification and experimental validation at the tsunami wave basin in the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at Oregon State University. Deliverables include modeling, analysis, and visualization tools for the sensitivity of fluid-structure interaction to uncertain fluid and structural parameters; high performance computing methods for fluid-structure interaction sensitivity; publication of research results for wider dissemination to other researchers and practitioners; and documentation of the approach for application by others.

The results of this research, if successful, will provide further insight in to how coastal structures respond to loads generated by tsunami runup and hurricane storm surge, potentially leading to improved design codes. The development of modeling and analysis tools in the open source software framework, OpenSees, will make the results of this project readily available to other researchers involved in fluid-structure interaction studies. Graduate students will benefit from this project by way of classroom instruction in fluid-structure interaction sensitivity and active participation in the research. The project will expose undergraduate engineering students to computing and visualization early in their academic career and an interdisciplinary senior capstone course will be developed in order to make civil engineering students cognizant of software engineering in professional practice. The outreach and ambassador components of the project aim to attract high school students interested in computing to pursue a degree in civil engineering.

Parallel programming is notoriously difficult, but essential to the future of computing. Much of the difficulty stems from the need to guarantee, in advance, that parallel computations will not conflict with one another.
Speculation provides an attractive alternative. By monitoring behavior at run time, and retrying computations that conflict, speculation can expose significant amounts of otherwise unexploitable parallelism, while imposing little or no conceptual burden on the programmer.

The sponsored research aims to make thread- and process-level speculation a fundamental feature of future programming systems, and to employ it in multiple forms and for multiple purposes: to automatically or semi-automatically parallelize sequential applications; to check, dynamically, the independence of explicitly parallel computations; to isolate the execution of semantically atomic functions; to enable optimizations that are not always safe; to parallelize scripting languages with one-thread-at-a-time semantics; and to profile applications in parallel, for feedback-driven optimization.

The project adopts a tiered approach that isolates the users of simpler programming idioms from the need to understand more complex alternatives.
At the implementation level, it stresses the seamless integration of shared memory and cluster-level distribution, compiler- and binary translator-based software instrumentation, virtual memory, and hardware speculation/transactions where available. Latter phases of the project place major emphasis on profiling tools to identify potentially independent program regions, which can then safely be executed in parallel (via speculation) in future runs.

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in so-called "dynamic" or "scripting" programming languages, which emphasize programmer productivity at the possible expense of run-time performance. Among other applications, scripting languages are central to much web-based and mobile computing. With increasing use, and with the proliferation of multicore processors, there will be inevitable pressure to improve the performance of these languages through parallel execution. Unfortunately, the state of the art in parallel scripting has not kept pace with parallel architecture developments. While many scripting languages support asynchronous handling of events from the external world, programmer-centric features, like dynamic typing, make it very difficult for event handlers and the main program
-- or multiple aspects of the main program -- to execute efficiently and simultaneously on separate cores of a modern processor.

The goal of this project is to build a detailed understanding of the tradeoffs between scripting language design and the performance of parallel execution. This goal is accomplished through two main tasks: (1) minimizing the overhead necessary to safeguard the language implementation in the face of parallel execution, and (2) quantifying the marginal cost of different models of data sharing and memory consistency. The bulk of the work takes place in the Ruby scripting language, widely used for Internet server development. This approach will leverage recent developments in transactional memory, read-mostly synchronization, and high-performance data structures.

This project will contribute directly to the training of students at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and to curricula for courses at both the advanced and introductory level. More broadly, effective support for parallelism in mainstream scripting languages can be expected to produce significant improvements in productivity across the full range of computer applications, in government, industry, science, the arts, and entertainment.

With the proliferation of multicore processors has come resurgence
of interest in parallel programming languages and models,
particularly those intended to make it easier for non-expert
programmers to correctly implement important classes of parallel
applications. Unfortunately, most such languages and models are
informally -- and thus imprecisely -- defined. The aim of the
sponsored research is to develop more formal definitions, which will
be needed in order to truly understand and reason about programs,
guide language implementations, and verify implementation
correctness. Within computer science and allied fields, formal
definitions will facilitate the transition to ubiquitous parallel
computing. For society at large, this transition will be essential
to maintain the momentum of the IT revolution, across government,
industry, science, the arts, and entertainment.

The technical core of the sponsored research is the use of
history-based executions to capture both the behavior of individual
threads of control and the interactions among those threads. In a
departure from previous work, the interactions are always expressed
in terms of atomic blocks, which can capture arbitrary
language-level synchronization mechanisms. Specific topics being
addressed include transactional memory (including the concepts of
publication and privatization), explicit speculation, and
determinism. The notion of determinism, in particular, is central
to several emerging languages and models specifically intended for
non-expert programmers. A formal framework for the definition of
determinism will allow alternative definitions to be compared,
contrasted, and correctly implemented.

This project investigates operating system mechanisms to manage hardware accelerator resources in a safe, fair, and protected manner while maintaining high performance. Programmable vector processors including general-purpose graphical processing units (GP-GPUs) and other accelerators for encryption, compression, media transcoding, pattern matching, parsing, etc. are increasingly ubiquitous in computer systems. For the sake of safety and fairness, such accelerators must be managed by the operating system, but for the sake of performance, they must be accessible directly from user-level applications, without OS intervention. The conflict between these goals is exacerbated by the opacity of proprietary library/driver/hardware interfaces. This project seeks a balanced solution to these conflicting goals through: (1) an operating system resource management architecture that allows direct user-level access in the common case, but intercedes in the existing accelerator access path when necessary to delay and re-order requests; (2) a tool chain that uncovers hidden interface semantics required for resource management, together with a characterization of the information needed from vendors in the future; and (3) an integrated management and scheduling strategy across the full set of computational resources in a given system.

By focusing on safe, fair, and efficient access to computational accelerators, the project aims to increase performance and power efficiency over a broad range of applications critical to today's digital economy and society. Broad dissemination is promoted through implementation in the Linux kernel, and open-source software release. Technology transfer is pursued through regular communication and collaboration with GPU industry vendors. Project research is integrated with education through curricular development and graduate student instruction.

Ongoing technology trends are accelerating scientific discovery by allowing researchers to generate enormous quantities of data, in domains ranging from computational biology to social networks. There is an urgent need to make it easy and fast to extract useful content from this data using appropriate abstractions and parallel runtimes. Work conducted under this project aims to make "big data" computing more readily available to applications with dynamic structure and irregular dependencies, thereby enabling advances in scientific computing in general and computational biology in particular.

This project extends the state of the art in scientific computing by developing programming abstractions to expose -- and run-time optimizations to exploit -- the parallelism available in large, irregular applications. Parallelism is essential for the extraction of useful information from ever increasing volumes of scientific data, but the irregularity of data structure and access in many problem domains makes efficient parallelization difficult. At the level of the programming model, the project addresses the challenge of irregularity by identifying design patterns for important new classes of applications -- in particular, those that use trees and graphs for data representation and access but demonstrate some structure in the traversal. At the level of the run-time system, it is developing computational engines that support and exploit the new patterns, leveraging the structure exposed to automatically and dynamically map computational tasks to hardware nodes.

The technical objective of this project is to develop tsunami loading and design recommendations for bridges that address issues that must be treated differently for bridges than for buildings. These issues include (1) three-dimensional bridge geometries such as deck shape, skew and embankments, whose hydraulic characteristics can lead to channelization, bore entrapment, and shielding; (2) debris impact and debris damming that can greatly increase the forces on a bridge, both during the initial impact of the tsunami waves and during the outflows; and (3) fluid-structure interaction effects that can be significant for particular types of bridges and retrofit strategies, such as the deployment of fenders or in cases with flexible structures. Bridge-specific retrofit strategies will also be explored. Recent advances in the development of parallel processing software and the availability of powerful computational platforms make it possible to simulate these complex effects. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling will address the effects of three-dimensional hydraulic geometries. The Material Point Method (MPM) will address the effects of debris impact fields and damming by modeling debris explicitly. The Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM), as implemented in OpenSees, will allow researchers to consider the fluid-structure interaction, the effects of the preceding earthquake shaking and the effect of uncertainties. As part of this planning grant, the simulation strategies will be developed sufficiently to guide the detailed design of critical experiments in a NEES2 facility early in FY2015.

Over the past decade, tsunamis have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. The loss of critical lifeline structures has exacerbated these catastrophes by delaying emergency response efforts and post-event economic recovery. Large tsunamis also threaten at least five U.S. states and numerous U.S. territories. Nearly all past tsunami research has focused on run-up modeling, the development of evacuation strategies, and more recently, on the design of buildings to resist tsunamis. In comparison, little research has addressed the tsunami performance of bridges, and no guidelines are available to design safe and economical tsunami-resistant bridges or to develop retrofit strategies. To these ends, the proposed research will transform the design of tsunami-resistant bridges, and consequently, greatly improve post-event response and recovery efforts. Data from this project will be archived and made available to the public through the NEES data repository. This award is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP).

Title: SHF: Small: Mainstream Transactional Memory

Transactional Memory (TM) is the union of two transformative ideas: first, that parallel programming will be easier if programmers can simply specify which operations in their code should be atomic, without specifying how to make them atomic; second, that this simplicity can be supported -- and performance often improved -- by a speculative implementation that executes atomic blocks in parallel, and backs out and retries when -- and only when -- those blocks conflict with one another. After many years of research, TM is now entering widespread use. Hardware support is commercially available from both IBM and Intel; software support is standard in Haskell and under consideration in several other programming languages -- notably C++. The sponsored research extends the state of the art in transactional memory by focusing on (1) software acceleration of fast hardware transactions and (2) hardware acceleration of rich software transactions.

The intellectual merits in focus area 1 comprise compiler-based techniques to increase speculation success rates, by safely and automatically moving commonly conflicting operations out of transactions, and by "pipelining" execution to serialize the remaining causes of conflict. The intellectual merits in focus area 2 comprise enhancements to the STM run-time system for the Haskell programming language, where hardware support can be used to accelerate transactions whose semantics are too complex to implement directly with commercial hardware. The broader impacts begin with easier construction of correct, efficient parallel code that will allow programmers of all skill levels to write that code more easily. Moreover, the work will impact computer science and allied fields by smoothing the transition to ubiquitous multithreading, thereby extending performance improvements through the next generation of computing. In summary, the work will lead to progress in almost any domain that is driven by parallel computing, across academia and industry.

This project at the University of Illinois at Chicago will help to improve the ability of engineering students to design technological products by creating and testing a means to assess functional reasoning capabilities. Functional reasoning is the ability to conceive of a task required in an engineering design problem as accomplished by a set of steps or functions. Functional reasoning allows engineers to decompose a mechanical system and correctly analyze it in terms of the functions performed by its subsystems and features. This project will develop a validated method to assess student understanding of function. Assessment of functional reasoning ability will improve engineering education and increase retention of students in engineering by helping faculty to more precisely determine the nature of the difficulties some students have in developing functional reasoning skills. The work will include a collaboration between faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago and faculty at community colleges.

This work will develop and validate a concept inventory for functional reasoning as a means to help promote thoughtful and effective teaching of functional reasoning to undergraduate students. Project personnel will apply accepted best practices in the development of the concept inventory. The approach will use Delphi study methods as a structured means to solicit information from experts in the content of functional design methods. While engineering function is often covered in senior-level engineering courses, this project will consider the teaching of functional reasoning in the context of design courses for first year engineering students. The project team anticipates that facility with functional reasoning may correlate with certain demographic variables; and a diverse and well-educated pool of engineers will depend upon a thoughtful, considered approach to teaching and learning about function. The project team includes engineering faculty with expertise in engineering design methodologies as well as collaborators from the learning sciences. The outcome of the work will be a concept inventory to assess functional reasoning ability in engineering students.

Data that need to be persistent, either for the sake of long-term access or for recovery from system crashes, have traditionally been kept on disk and flash drives, which are very slow. Within the next few years, much faster persistent memory is expected to be widely available at reasonable cost, raising the possibility that file systems might be replaced, at least in part, by memory that is simply "always available." The intellectual merits of the project lie in addressing two key challenges to such "always available memory": first, ensuring that the values in memory in the wake of a system crash are always mutually consistent, despite the possibility that traditional caches often pass data to the memory out of order; second, safeguarding the structural integrity of persistent data despite the possibility that buggy programs may erroneously modify arbitrary memory locations. The project's broader significance and importance lie in the promise of significant improvements in programmability, reliability, and system performance, and in the ability to survive power outages and hardware failures at much lower cost than has previously been possible. This latter benefit may be of particular importance for ubiquitous sensors in the Internet of Things.

The project builds on prior work by the principal investigator and colleagues, which has developed formal correctness criteria for persistent data, together with automatic methods to guarantee this correctness. The current project is pursuing three major research thrusts. First, it is developing a library of reusable, high-performance persistent data structures, with particular emphasis on exploiting high-level semantics to minimize instrumentation overhead, maintaining sufficient information to complete or undo partial operations in the wake of a program or system crash, and formalizing and proving correctness. Second, the project is developing techniques to compose persistent operations into larger atomic transactions. This work builds on past experience with hardware and software transactional memory, and encompasses both nonblocking and lock-based approaches. Particular emphasis is being placed on "boosting" the operations of persistent data structures so that they can serve as reversible high-level operations of a transactional system. Third, the project is developing mechanisms (including user-level daemons, compiler-based sandboxing, fine-grain memory protection, and the use of virtualization hardware) to ensure that persistent data is modified only by trusted library code, thereby safeguarding its structural integrity in the presence of buggy applications.

This collaborative research brings together five public universities with the goal of developing, implementing, studying, evaluating and disseminating a state level AGEP Alliance model to increase the number of historically underrepresented minority (URM) tenure-track faculty in the biomedical sciences. This AGEP Alliance model represents a state system approach to recruiting and training URM postdoctoral fellows and transitioning them into tenure-track faculty positions. In addition to providing professional development and mentoring for a group of 16 URM postdoctoral fellows and early career faculty, this AGEP Alliance also addresses institutional URM faculty hiring and advancement policies and practices. This AGEP Alliance model work is through partnerships between the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Salisbury University, Towson University, the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), and the University of Maryland at Baltimore.

This alliance was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552). The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of URM graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. AGEP Transformation Alliances develop, replicate or reproduce; implement and study, via integrated educational and social science research, models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of URMs in STEM and/or STEM education research careers. While this Alliance is primarily funded by the AGEP program, additional support has been provided by the NSF INCLUDES program, which focuses on catalyzing the STEM enterprise to collaboratively work for inclusive change. The ADVANCE program also provided support for this AGEP Alliance model work, and the ADVANCE program embraces three goals that are relevant to this Alliance model's development, implementation and testing: To develop systemic approaches to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic STEM careers; to develop innovative and sustainable ways to promote gender equity that involve both men and women in the STEM academic workforce; and to contribute to the research knowledge base on gender equity and the intersection of gender and other social identities in STEM academic careers.

As the nation addresses a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, our universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, work with and emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of these senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities, and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. This AGEP Alliance's state system approach is advancing a model to improve the success of URM early career biomedical sciences faculty, which ultimately leads to improved academic mentorship for URM undergraduate students in STEM and innovative biological science research to benefit our nation's security, economic progress and prosperity.

The integrated research component, led by UMCP's KerryAnn O'Meara examines how the intersectionality of race, ethnicity and gender shape the experiences of candidates for assistant professorships, and the evaluation of those candidates by reviewers. Institutional faculty hiring practices, processes and procedures are also being studied to better understand how they advantage or disadvantage some candidates over others.

This AGEP Alliance state system model is engaging institutional leadership and external advisory boards, which will provide feedback to the team and suggest adjustments to model development, implementation and testing, as well as efforts for institutional transformation and sustainability. Staff at Westat will provide formative and summative evaluations. The dissemination plan includes article submissions to peer-reviewed social science, academic career diversity, and disciplinary education and research journals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Abstract ? The neuronal basis of diseases of disordered feeding, such as bulimia, anorexia and binge eating disorder, is poorly understood. Dysfunction of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), however, has been suggested to play a causative role, as altered mPFC activity correlates with changes in novelty seeking and impulsivity in people with diseases of disordered feeding. Unfortunately, little is known about how the medial prefrontal cortex regulates these behaviors. To gain a better understanding of how the mPFC functions and thus how dysfunction could lead to behavioral change, three important questions must be answered. 1. How do specific projections from the mPFC control binge feeding, novelty seeking and impulsivity? 2. What role do important modulatory interneurons that act within the mPFC play in regulating these same behaviors? 3. Do specific circuit alterations that produce changes in impulsivity and novelty seeking also coordinately modify binge feeding behavior? To address this knowledge gap, in Aim 1, we will test the necessity and sufficiency of projections from the prefrontal cortex to the rostral nucleus accumbens in the control of binge feeding, novelty seeking and impulsive behavior. In support of these studies, we have shown that this projection is necessary for the regulation of novelty seeking behavior. To test the sufficiency of the projection, a Cre recombinase expression dependent excitatory Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADD), delivered from an adeno associated virus, will be injected into the prefrontal cortex. To examine the necessity of the projection, a Cre recombinase expression dependent caspase protein, delivered from an adeno-associated virus, will be used. Specificity of targeting the cortex-acumbens projection will be achieved by the injection of a retrogradely transported virus, expressing cre recombinase, into the nucleus accumbens. In Aim 2, we will determine whether a specific gabaergic interneuron population in the prefrontal cortex expressing vasoactive intestinal peptide is necessary and sufficient to regulate binge food intake, novelty seeking and impulsivity. Our studies are supported by preliminary data that shows how these cells are both necessary and sufficient to produce a change in binge feeding and novelty seeking. To test the sufficiency of these neurons in the control of binge feeding, impulsivity and novelty seeking, we will excite the mPFC VIP neurons optogenetically. Again, to examine the necessity of these neurons, we will deliver a caspase protein selectively to ablate the mPFC VIP neurons. Our proposed work will significantly enhance our understanding of how the frontal cortex regulates behaviors associated with diseases of disordered feeding and drug addiction.

Technological innovations are leading to increasing numbers and varieties of data storage devices. Important application domains are simultaneously becoming more data centric, and many of the most significant design challenges revolve around access to large, richly structured sources of information. To help programmers manage the complexity of data and devices, this project is developing new ways to organize and access data, to automate its movement and placement, and to protect it from accidental loss or corruption.

By leveraging programmer specifications of application behavior and of performance, protection, and fault tolerance objectives (and by inferring these where possible), developed techniques will efficiently and automatically move data among devices including 3D-stacked and new nonvolatile alternatives with differing bandwidth, latency, and persistence properties. Fast, convenient access to byte-addressable nonvolatile memory will be provided through a new persistent segment abstraction. Targeted platforms will range from individual mobile or desktop machines to rack-level systems with "disaggregated" memory blades.

As computing moves into the era of big data, techniques to manage large, fast, persistent memories have the potential to facilitate breakthroughs across the whole range of human endeavor, in government, industry, science, the arts, and entertainment. Students will gain experience with memory technologies and management techniques through new instructional modules in operating systems, programming languages, and parallel and distributed computing courses at the University of Rochester. Efforts to increase participation among traditionally underrepresented groups, in both the laboratory and the classroom, will complement existing department activities, including participation in the ABI/HMC BRAID initiative.

Software and data developed under the project will be made publicly available under standard open-source licenses using platforms such as GitHub, and will be accessible for at least three years past the end of the grant. They will be shared with industrial contacts at Google, Facebook, IBM, Intel, AMD, Oracle, and others. Publications associated with the project will be made available at http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/sandhya/publications.html and at http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/scott/papers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.