Ioan Raicu

Ioan Raicu

Computation Innovation Fellow at Northwestern University

Greater Chicago Area

Current
Past

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14 more...

Education
  • University of Chicago
  • University of Chicago
  • Wayne State University
  • Wayne State University

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1 more...

Connections
122 connections
Industry
Research

Ioan Raicu’s Summary

Many-task computing (MTC) aims to bridge the gap between two computing paradigms, high throughput computing (HTC) and high performance computing (HPC). MTC is reminiscent to HTC, but it differs in the emphasis of using many computing resources over short periods of time to accomplish many computational tasks, where the primary metrics are measured in seconds (e.g. floating point operations per second, tasks per second, input or output rates per second), as opposed to operations per day or month (e.g. jobs per month). MTC denotes high-performance computations comprising of multiple distinct activities, coupled via file system operations. Tasks may be small or large, uniprocessor or multiprocessor, compute-intensive or data-intensive. The set of tasks may be static or dynamic, homogeneous or heterogeneous, loosely coupled or tightly coupled. The aggregate number of tasks, quantity of computing, and volumes of data may be extremely large. MTC includes loosely coupled applications that are generally communication-intensive but not naturally expressed using message passing interface commonly found in HPC, drawing attention to the many computations that are heterogeneous but not “happily” parallel.

My research work explores fundamental issues in defining the MTC paradigm, as well as theoretical and practical issues in supporting both compute and data intensive MTC on large scale systems. We have defined an abstract model for data diffusion, have defined scheduling policies with heuristics to optimize real world performance, and developed a competitive online caching eviction policy. We also designed and implemented the necessary middleware – Falkon – to enable the support of MTC on clusters, grids and supercomputers. Falkon, a Fast and Light-weight tasK executiON framework, addresses shortcomings in traditional resource management systems that support HTC and HPC that are not suitable or efficient at supporting MTC applications.

Ioan Raicu’s Specialties:

Programming Languages: proficient: C, C++, JAVA; familiar C#, ML, PC (Parallel C)
Tools/Packages: Globus Toolkit 4, Visual Studio .NET, JXTA, Office, IIS
Operating Systems: Windows, Solaris, Linux
Hardware: x86 PCs, Sparc Workstations, routers (IBM & Ericsson), Agere Network Processor
Distributed Testbeds: TeraGrid, Open Science Grid (OSG), TeraPort, Tier3, PlanetLab

Ioan Raicu’s Experience

  • Computation Innovation Fellow

    Northwestern University

    (Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

    August 2009 — Present (4 months)

    I am a NSF/CRA Computation Innovation Fellow at Northwestern University, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I hold a Ph.D. (March 2009) in Computer Science from University of Chicago under the guidance of Dr. Ian Foster in the Distributed Systems Laboratory. I also obtained a Master of Science in Computer Science from University of Chicago in 2005, another Master of Science in Computer Science from Wayne State University in 2002, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2000. My research work and interests are in the general area of distributed systems. My dissertation work focused on this relatively new paradigm of Many-Task Computing (MTC), which aims to bridge the gap between two predominant paradigms from distributed systems, High-Throughput Computing (HTC) and High-Performance Computing (HPC). My dissertation work focused on defining and exploring both the theory and practical aspects of realizing MTC across a wide range of large-scale distributed systems. I am particularly interested in efficient task dispatch and execution systems, resource provisioning, data management, scheduling, and performance evaluations in distributed systems. My work has been funded by the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (2005 - 2006, Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357), the NASA Ames Research Center Graduate Student Research Program (2006 - 2009, Grant Number NNA06CB89H), and most recently by the prestigious NSF/CRA CIFellows program (2009 - 2010, Award Number 0937060). My future work will focus on resource management in large scale distributed systems with a focus on many-task computing, data intensive computing, cloud computing, grid computing, and many-core computing.

  • Research Visitor

    NASA Ames Research Center

    (Government Agency; Defense & Space industry)

    March 2009 — May 2009 (3 months)

  • Research Assistant

    University of Chicago

    (Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

    October 2003 — March 2009 (5 years 6 months)

    • Designed and developed a Web Services-based system, AstroPortal, that uses grid computing to federate large computing and storage resources for dynamic analysis of large datasets
    • Deployed the AstroPortal on the TeraGrid distributed infrastructure and applied the stacking function to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), DR4, which comprises about 300 million objects dispersed over 1.3 million files and more than 10 terabytes of data
    • Designed, implemented, and deployed Falkon, a Fast and Light-weight tasK executiON framework
    o Falkon is being used to run applications that involve many small tasks across the TeraGrid using the Swift workflow system
    o Falkon has built in data management capabilities to harness the local disk I/O from many compute nodes in deployed Grids, and to avoid shared file systems as much as possible
    o Falkon s being ported to operate on the new IBM BlueGene/P Supercomputer that will be online at Argonne National Laboratory later this year.

  • GSRP Fellowship Recipient

    NASA Ames Research Center

    (Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Defense & Space industry)

    2006 — 2007 (1 year )

  • Visiting Graduate Student

    Argonne National Laboratory, MCS

    (Computer Software industry)

    2003 — 2007 (4 years )

  • Graduate Student

    Computational Institute at the University of Chicago

    (Computer Software industry)

    2003 — 2007 (4 years )

  • Researcher (internship)

    Argonne National Laboratory

    (Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Research industry)

    June 2006 — September 2006 (4 months)

    Built a prototype of the AstroPortal, an astronomy gateway to Grid resources on the TeraGrid.

  • Researcher (internship)

    Argonne National Laboratory

    (Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Research industry)

    June 2005 — September 2005 (4 months)

    Built performance models in order to aid the design of a large scale science portal (an astronomy application having 100K+ users accessing 3TB+ of data) into the TeraGrid.

  • Researcher (internship)

    Sun Microsystems

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; SUNW; Computer Hardware industry)

    May 2003 — September 2003 (5 months)

    • Mobile IPv6 support in Solaris 10
    o Added mobile IPv6 support in Snoop
    o Contributed to a traffic generator capable of Mobile IPv6 traffic
    o Configured a Mobile IPv6 testbed
    • Neon Project (a system architecture that defines network data flow management and enforcement over high bandwidth networks)
    o Built a framework to validate the system functionally and performance

  • Teaching Assistant

    Purdue University

    (Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Higher Education industry)

    September 2002 — May 2003 (9 months)

    Taught undergraduate lab in Introduction to Networking

  • Teaching Assistant

    Purdue University

    (Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Higher Education industry)

    August 2002 — May 2003 (10 months)

    Taught undergraduate lab in Introduction to Networking

  • Adjunct Assistant Professor

    University of Michigan-Dearborn

    (Educational Institution; 501-1000 employees; Higher Education industry)

    June 2002 — August 2002 (3 months)

    Taught an undergraduate level course: Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C++

  • Research Assistant

    Wayne State University

    (Educational Institution; 5001-10,000 employees; Higher Education industry)

    January 2002 — August 2002 (8 months)

    • Performed research on QoS support over IP based networks using RSVP
    • Evaluated IPv4 & IPv6 network protocols under both Windows 2K and Solaris 8
    • Evaluated IPv6 tunneling over IPv4 networks

  • Wireless Network Specialist

    City of Detroit

    (Government Agency; 501-1000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    September 2001 — May 2002 (9 months)

    • Advised in the evaluation of project “Suburban Meters Automation and Replacement”
    • Performed a Gap Analysis between the requested system and the delivered implemented system
    • Final recommendations were given to correct deficiencies found

  • Teaching Assistant

    Wayne State University

    (Educational Institution; 5001-10,000 employees; Higher Education industry)

    September 2000 — December 2001 (1 year 4 months)

    • Developed and taught undergraduate Computer Science Courses and/or Labs:
    o Problem Solving & Programming in C++

  • Researcher (internship)

    Accenture

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; ACN; Information Technology and Services industry)

    May 2001 — August 2001 (4 months)

    • Extensively used the University of California, Berkeley designed TinyOS and Rene Motes (wireless sensors nodes)
    • Using the Rene Motes infrastructure, developed a proximity detector for indoor localization to append to an outdoor GPS tracking system; the end product was a complete end-to-end solution for indoor tracking

  • Owner

    High Teck Computers (Sole Proprietorship)

    (Sole Proprietorship; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    January 1997 — March 2001 (4 years 3 months)

    • Founder and owner of small profitable business for 4 years
    • Setup and maintenance of networks for small businesses
    • Assembling, sales, and support for over 3000 computers throughout the state of Michigan
    • Accounting related duties pertaining to the entire business

  • System Analyst (internship)

    Ford Motor Company

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; F; Automotive industry)

    May 1999 — August 1999 (4 months)

    Client/server programming in C, C++, and Java under UNIX and Windows NT 4.0 to link supplier end stations to the main head end servers

Ioan Raicu’s Education

  • University of Chicago

    PhD , Computer Science , 2005 — 2009

  • University of Chicago

    MS , Computer Science , 2003 — 2005

  • Wayne State University

    MS , Computer Science , 2000 — 2002

  • Wayne State University

    BS , Computer Science , 1997 — 2000

Additional Information

Ioan Raicu’s Interests:

My main area of research is Grid Computing, with an emphasis on resource management in large scale distributed systems and grid computing. Within resource management, I am particularly interested in efficient task dispatch and execution systems, resource provisioning, data management, scheduling, and performance evaluations. I am also interested in Parallel Computing, Networking, Peer-to-Peer Networks, and Wireless Sensor Networks. I am currently on the job market for a tenure-track assistant professor position in academia, or a research position in an industry research lab, a government lab, or academia.

Ioan Raicu’s Groups:

IEEE
ACM

  •    University of Chicago Alumni
  •    SC07: SuperComputing 2007
  •    SC06: SuperComputing 2006
  •    SC05: SuperComputing 2005
  •    Open GRID
  •    Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing
  •    grid computing
  •    Cloud Computing
  •    High Performance Computing (HPC).
  •    HPC Professionals
  •    Cloud
  •    SC08: SuperComputing 2008
  •    SC08 Broadening Engagement Job Fair
  •    SC09: SuperComputing 2009
  •    HPCcloud

Ioan Raicu’s Honors:

Computation Innovation Fellow (2009 - 2010) awarded by NSF/CRA
GSRP Fellowship (2008 - 2009) awarded by Ames Research Center, NASA
GSRP Fellowship (2007 - 2008) awarded by Ames Research Center, NASA
GSRP Fellowship (2006 - 2007) awarded by Ames Research Center, NASA
Graduate Student Fellowship Incentive Grant (2003) awarded by Purdue Univ
Presidential Scholarship (1997 – 2000) awarded by Wayne State University
Goldy Gemu Scholarship (1997 – 1998) awarded by AROY
Stanitz Scholarship (1997 – 1998) awarded by AROY

Ioan Raicu’s Contact Settings

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