14th Intl Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Conferences
We are delighted to be able to host two well-known international scholars for offering the keynote speeches, Professor Hamid R. Arabnia. University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA and Professor Prof Lionel Ni, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong. In addition, we have the pleasure of hosting Professor Weijia Jia, City University of Hong Kong who has kindly accepted to be an invited speaker at ICPADS'08. The details of each speaker's talks and their backgrounds are given below.
Professor Hamid R. Arabnia
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia, USA
hra@cs.uga.edu
Keynote Title: A Scalable and Reconfigurable Network Topology for Medical Imaging
ABSTRACT
Inherent limitations on the computational power of sequential uniprocessor systems have lead to the development of parallel multiprocessor systems. The two major issues in the formulation and design of parallel multiprocessor systems are algorithm design and architecture design. The parallel multiprocessor systems should be so designed so as to facilitate the design and implementation of the efficient parallel algorithms that exploit optimally the capabilities of the system. From an architectural point of view, the system should have low hardware complexity, be capable of being built of components that can be easily replicated, should exhibit desirable cost-performance characteristics, be cost effective and exhibit good scalability in terms of hardware complexity and cost with increasing problem size. In distributed memory multiprocessor systems, the processing elements can be considered to be nodes that are connected together via an interconnection network. In order to facilitate algorithm and architecture design, we require that the interconnection network have a low diameter, the system be symmetric and each node in the system have low degree of connectivity. Further, it is also desirable that the system configuration and behavior be amenable to a suitable and tractable mathematical description. The requirement of network symmetry ensures that each node in the network is identical to any other, thereby greatly reducing the architecture and algorithm design effort. For most symmetric network topologies, however, the requirements of low degree of connectivity for each node and low network diameter are often conflicting. Low network diameter often entails that each node in the network have a high degree of connectivity resulting in a drastic increase in the number of inter-processor connection links. A low degree of connectivity on the other hand, results in a high network diameter which in turn results in high inter-processor communication overhead and reduced efficiency of parallelism. Reconfigurable networks attempt to address this tradeoff. In a reconfigurable network each node has a fixed degree of connectivity irrespective of the network size. The network diameter is restricted by allowing the network to reconfigure itself into different configurations. Broadly speaking, a reconfigurable system needs to satisfy the following criteria in order to be considered practically viable: (a) In each configuration the nodes in the network should have a fixed degree of connectivity irrespective of network size, (b) The network diameter should be kept low via the reconfiguration mechanism and (c) The hardware for the reconfiguration mechanism (i.e. switch) should be of reasonable complexity. In this presentation, we discuss our design of a reconfigurable network topology that is targeted at medical applications. We present some results and discuss the future roadmap of this project. We will also present our ongoing work which attempts to make the reconfiguration mechanism of the network seamless to the application programmer.
BIOGRAPHY
Hamid R. Arabnia received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Kent (Canterbury, England) in 1987. In 1987, he worked as a Consultant for Caplin Cybernetics Corporation (London, England), where he helped in the design of a number of image processing algorithms that were targeted at a particular parallel machine architecture. Prof. Arabnia is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at University of Georgia (Georgia, USA), where he has been since October 1987. His research interests include Parallel and distributed processing techniques and algorithms, interconnection networks, and applications (in particular, in image processing, medical imaging, and other computational intensive problems). Prof. Arabnia is the founding chair of WORLDCOMP Congress. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Supercomputing (Springer) and is on the editorial and advisory boards of 17 other journals and magazines. He is the chair of the world committee of PDPTA (Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications research organization: PDPTA is composed of 28 task forces with over 2,800 active participants) and is on the Advisory Board of IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC).
Professor Lionel M. Ni
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
ni@cse.ust.hk
Keynote Title: Digital City Monitoring and Emergency Management
ABSTRACT
The impact of information technology on all aspects of human society is getting deeper and deeper. Many services are required in an urban environment, such as areas that are traffic congested, areas that are flooded, and areas that are polluted, due to different environmental and spatial-temporal conditions. This talk will address three important tasks in a digital city. First, we wish to provide a 3D model of a city so that the areas of interests of a city can be visualized from different angles. Second, we want to collect dynamic information of a city, such as pollution distribution, traffic distribution and population distribution, so that they can be monitored and transmitted in real time. Third, based on the static 3D model and dynamic environmental monitoring, we can do a better planning for the city and can even predict the consequence when a certain disaster occurs. The talk will discuss the potential benefits from digitalization of a city and the research challenges to be overcome in order to realize yet another IT dream.
BIOGRAPHY
Lionel M. Ni is Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Affiliate Professor at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is Chief Scientist of the China National 973 Program on wireless sensor networks. Dr. Ni earned his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 1980. A fellow of IEEE, Dr. Ni has chaired over 30 professional conferences, delivered over 30 keynote speeches, produced 37 Ph.D. students, won six best paper awards, and published three books. According to Google scholar, his research papers, covering high performance computing, high speed networking, distributed systems, mobile computing, and pervasive computing, have been cited for over 5000 times.
Professor Weijia Jia
Department of Computer Science
Director of Future Networking Centre - Shenzhen Research Institute
City University of Hong Kong
wei.jia@cityu.edu.hk
Invited Speaker Title: Secure & Smart Ubiquitous Networking
ABSTRACT
Secure & Smart Ubiquitous communications require wireless networking and infrastructure network support. The first step is to look at how the different available technologies will integrate and work with each other. One of the next steps is to seek solutions for connecting "ubiquitous devices" to such "integrated and heterogeneous networks". These two steps together form the evolutionary approach towards ubiquitous networking. This talk will introduces our currently implemented secure & smart ubiquitous networking system which is an intelligent platform to provide the mobile users with smooth QoS and secure connections/communications, synchronization and roaming over the heterogeneous3G/WiMAX/WiFi, Sensor networking.
BIOGRAPHY
Prof. Jia is currently a full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Director of Future Networking Center, ShenZhen Research Institute of City University of Hong Kong (CityU). He received BSc and MSc from Center South University , China in 1982 and 1984 and Master of Applied Sci. and PhD from Polytechnic Faculty of Mons, Belgium in 1992 and 1993 respectively, all in Computer Science. He joined German National Research Center for Information Science (GMD) in Bonn (St. Augustine) from 1993 to 1995 as a research fellow. In 1995, he joined Department of Computer Science, CityU as an assistant professor.
Prof. Jia’s research interests include next generation wireless communication, protocols and heterogeneous networks; distributed systems, multicast and anycast QoS routing protocols. In these fields, he has over 300 publications in the prestige international journals (IEEE Transactions, e.g., TPDS, TC, TMC etc.), books/chapters and refereed international conference proceedings (e.g. ACM MobiHoc, SenSys, IEEE ICDCS, INFOCOM etc.). He (with W. Zhou) has published a book “Distributed Network Systems” by Springer where the book contains extensive research materials and implementation examples. He has received the best paper award in a prestige (IEEE) conference and (with J. Chen et. al) has proposed an improved algorithm for well-known Vertex Cover and Set-packing NP-hard problems with time bounds of O(kn+1.2852k) and O((5.7k)kn) respectively. Both results stand on the current best time-bound to date for the fixed-parameterized intractable problems.
Prof. Jia is the Chair Professor of Central South University, Changsha, China, Guest Professor of University of Science and Technology of China, Beijing Jiaotong University and Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. He has served as the editor and guest editor for international journals and PC chairs and members/keynote speakers for various prestige international conferences. He has been listed in Marquis Who’s Who (VIP) in the World (2000-2008). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Member of ACM.