Current Research Projects - Philip K. McKinley

RAPIDware: Component-Based Development of Adaptable and Dependable Middleware

The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a unified methodology for designing middleware components to support distributed computing in heterogeneous, mobile environments.  The design methodology applies to adaptive communication protocols, fault tolerance and security services, and reconfigurable user interfaces. The methodology is supported by a programming paradigm that enables declarative specifications of quality-of-service needs, evolution of the system to accommodate new technologies and services, and automated checking of functional and nonfunctional properties of the system. The project will produce tools to support the development and reuse of middleware components, based on these techniques, as well as industry-guided case studies of their use.  Supported by the Office of Naval Research under Grant No. N00014-01-1-0744.
 

• Meridian: An Integrated Toolkit for Developing Interactive Distributed Applications

This project involves the integration and validation of Meridian, a collection of tools designed to help automate the development of interactive distributed applications (IDAs). Collectively, these tools will support diagram-based modeling, rigorous correctness analysis, software reuse, automated code generation, and software visualization. Moreover, they will interact with one another through explicit design representations with formally defined semantics, enabling requirements to be traced from high-level models to low-level code. In order to validate the Meridian toolkit and facilitate technology transfer, case studies of three different classes of IDAs will be conducted using projects supplied by industrial partners. This project is supported in part by a grant from the NSF/EIA Experimental Partnerships Program (EIA-0000433).

 

• Pavilion: Communication Services for Collaborative Computing

This research project addresses the design of communication protocols and middleware to support collaborative applications in heterogeneous environments.  The project focuses on several  major issues of interoperability: host-level group communication protocols that adapt to dynamic network conditions; object-oriented middleware design to support software reuse, extensibility, and maintenance; proxy-based services that dynamically conform to participants with disparate computing devices and network connections; and techniques for incorporating domain-specific policies and functionality into collaborative middleware and systems software.  This project is supported in part by NSF grant CCR-9912407.

Past Research Projects

• Group Communication Protocols for Computer Networks

This project addresses network support for group operations, such as multipoint connection management and leader election, by taking advantage of internal routing information. The resulting protocols are applicable to both ATM networks and the Internet. This research is supported in part by NSF grant NCR-9706285.
 
• Collective Communication for Parallel and Distributed Processing

This project addresses the design of collective communication operations, such as multicast, global reduction, and barrier synchronization, for use by parallel and distributed applications. Target architectures include both massively parallel processors (MPPs) and networks of workstations (NOWs). This research has been supported in part by NSF grant CCR-9503838.
 
• Communication Library Design

This project investigates methods to improve the programmability of parallel and distributed architectures without sacrificing performance. Early work in this area addressed the design of communication libraries for scalable parallel architectures. More recent work has focused software reuse through object-oriented design. This project has been supported in part by DOE grant DE-FG02-93ER25167.
 
• Multicast Communication in Multicomputers

This project investigated one-to-many, or multicast, communication in multicomputers. The project comprised three primary tasks: design of unicast-based multicast algorithms, design of hardware support for multicast, and use of multicast algorithms in parallel applications. This project was supported in part by NSF grant MIP-9204066.