CGrADS Site Visit Participant - John Mellor-Crummey

Professional Preparation

John Mellor-Crummey
Computer Science
Senior Faculty Fellow Rice University

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Appointments:

• 1998 - Senior Faculty Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Rice University
• 1992 - 1998 Faculty Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Rice University
• 1989 - 1992 Research Associate, Department of Computer Science, Rice University

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Synergistic Activities

John Mellor-Crummey is a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, a research faculty appointment commensurate with the rank of Associate Professor. In 1996, he was named as a member of the technical steering committee of the CRPC. In 1999, Rice University and Los Alamos National Laboratory jointly established the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute (LACSI). Since the founding of LACSI, Mellor-Crummey has served as a member of its Executive Committee and has led the Institute’s research effort in compilation, systems and performance evaluation.

Mellor-Crummey’s research has focused on topics in parallel computing. His early research focused on debugging and performance analysis of parallel programs. Techniques he developed for replaying executions of parallel programs for the purpose of debugging are today used in environments such as IBM's DejaVu debugger for Java. He is most widely known for multi-processor synchronization algorithms he developed with Michael Scott (University of Rochester), which are widely used in practice. A significant focus of his research since 1993 has been the development of data-parallel compiler technology to support parallel scientific computing.

Mellor-Crummey is currently an investigator in an ASCI Level-2 academic partnership in which he is leading a research effort to develop techniques to improve scalar performance of ASCI scientific codes. As part of that effort, he is leading development of HPCView, a performance analysis tool that is currently being used by application scientists at LANL and Sandia National Laboratories.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Mellor-Crummey worked with the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms on automatic parallelization of a research code for mesoscale modeling of severe storms and with a team from Rice and the University of Houston on the parallelization of CHARMM, a widely used computational chemistry program developed at Harvard.

He is currently a member of program committees for the upcoming Los Alamos Institute Computer Science Symposium (Santa Fe, NM), International Symposium on Distributed Computing 2001 (Lisbon, Portugal), and Parallel Computing 2001 (Naples, Italy). He was previously a member of the program committees for Supercomputing (2000), International Conference on Parallel Processing (1999), International Parallel Computing Conference (1999,1997), International Conference on Supercomputing (1997, 1996), and the Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Tools (1996). He was a member of the technical infrastructure working group at the Workshop on Software Tools for High Performance Computing Systems (1996), the software tools working group at the Pasadena Workshop on System Software and Tools for High Performance Computing Environments (1992), and a NSF Review Panel for Experimental Software Systems (1997).

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Related Publications:

1. Vikram S. Adve and John M. Mellor-Crummey. “Using Integer Sets for Data-Parallel Program Analysis and Optimization,” Proceedings of the Acm Sigplan ’98 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, Montreal, CA, (June 1998).
2. Vikram S. Adve, Guohua Jin, John M. Mellor-Crummey and Qing Yi. “High Performance Fortran Compilation Techniques for Parallelizing Scienti•c Codes,” Proceedings of Supercomputing 98: High Performance Networking and Computing, Orlando, FL, (November 1998).
3. Bo Lu and John M. Mellor-Crummey. “Compiler Optimization of Implicit Reductions for Distributed- Memory Multiprocessors,” Proceedings of the 12th International Parallel Processing Symposium, Orlando, FL, (May 1998).
4. John M. Mellor-Crummey and Vikram S. Adve. “Simplifying Control Flow in Compiler-Generated Parallel Code,” International Journal of Parallel Programming, 26(5), 1998. Special Issue with selected papers from the 10th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing.
5. K.D. Cooper, M.W. Hall, R.T. Hood, K. Kennedy, K.S. McKinley, J.M. Mellor-Crummey, L. Torczon, and S.K. Warren. “The ParaScope Parallel Programming Environment,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 81(2):244–263, February 1993.

Other Significant Publications:

1. John M. Mellor-Crummey and Michael Scott. “Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared- Memory Multiprocessors,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9(1):21–65, February 1991.
2. Thomas J. LeBlanc and John M. Mellor-Crummey, “Debugging Parallel Programs with Instant Replay,” IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-36(4):471–482, April 1987.
3. John M. Mellor-Crummey and Thomas J. LeBlanc. “A Software Instruction Counter,” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, (April 1989), 78–86.
4. John M. Mellor-Crummey, David Whalley and Ken Kennedy. “Improving Memory Hierarchy Performance for Irregular Applications,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing, Rhodes, Greece ,(June 1999), 425–433. (Selected to appear in a future special issue of the International Journal of Parallel Programming.)
5. John M. Mellor-Crummey. “On-the-fly Detection of Data Races for Programs with Nested Fork-Join Parallelism,” Proceedings of Supercomputing ’91, Albuquerque, NM, (November 1991), 24–33.

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Collaborators:

Current Collaborators: Vikram Adve (UIUC), Ralph Brickner, Alan Cox (Rice), Robert Fowler (Rice), Guohua Jin (Rice), Ken Kennedy (Rice), Gerald Roth (Gonzaga U.), David Whalley (Florida State), Qing Yi (Rice), Ewing Lusk (ANL), Barbara Chapman (U. of Houston), Jarek Nieplocha (PNNL), Katherine Yelick (UC Berkeley), Tom Sterling (Caltech/JPL), Bill Gropp (ANL), Ricky Kendall (Ames Laboratory), Robert Lucas (LBNL), Guang Gao (U. of Delaware), D. Panda (OSU), and Marianne Winslett (UIUC). As part of a multiinstitutional effort, I interact with Dennis Gannon (Indiana U.), Fran Berman and Andrew Chien (UCSD), Carl Kesselman, (USC ISI), Lennart Johnsson (U. of Houston), Dan Reed and Ruth Aydt (UIUC), Jack Dongarra and Rich Wolski (U. of Tennessee).

Thesis Advisees: Bo Lu (National Semiconductor), Collin McCurdy (U. of Wisconsin), Kai Zhang (Compaq), Daniel Chavarria-Miranda

Thesis Advisor: Thomas LeBlanc (University of Rochester)

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