Distributed Computing Systems Group (DCSG)
The DCSG at the University of Minnesota is led by Professor Jon Weissman. The group performs
applications-driven systems research in the area of Computational Grids. In particular, we are working on systems, middleware, and techniques to support high-end Grid applications and end-users. We work in "layer 3" of the Grid protocol stack, layer 1 being the physical resources, layer 2 the enabling Grid infrastructure or Grid OS, and layer 4 is the Grid application.
The goal of our
research is to advance the theory and practice of Grid
Computing. In our view, Grids will not be successful until they
are invisible and effortless to use. Towards this vision, we are
working in several areas: scheduling and resource management
(high-performance must be automatically delivered to Grid
applications with little programmer effort), and Grid-based
service infrastructures (using Grid technology to build high-level,
easy-to-use, environments, that hide their underlying Grid implementation).
To achieve our goal, we do a mixture of system building, middleware
design, and performance evaluation (both in simulation and in live
experiments). We also produce running prototypes that serve as
testbeds for our research and proof-of-concept demonstrations.