Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Xian-He Sun, along with two of his former students and other collaborators, received the Best Paper Award at the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications. ISPA’16 was held in Tianjin, China, in August.

The paper is titled “Rethinking High Performance Computing System Architecture for Scientific Big Data Applications.” The other co-authors are Illinois Tech alumni Yong Chen (Ph.D. CS ’09) and Yanlog Yin (Ph.D. CS ’14), both former students of Sun; Chao Chen, who is Yong Chen’s former student; William D. Gropp, Parallel Computing Institute Director, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Rajeev Thakur, deputy director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division and senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior fellow in the Computation Institute, University of Chicago.

Yong Chen is currently an assistant professor of computer science at Texas Tech University. Yin is a financial software developer at Bloomberg in New York City.

The paper analyzes and demonstrates the potential of a new decoupled computing paradigm where computing intensive operation phases and data intensive operation phases of an application are separated and handled by different hardware and software. The motivation of this research is that high performance data analytics require both high performance computing power and high performance data processing power. However, while good solutions exist for computing and data individually, there is no good solution to provide both at the same time.