SCHOOL OF COMPUTINGThe University of Utah

SPRING 2011

TheUTAH TEAPOT

In this Issue

EAE Programs Ranked Top 10

New UndergraduateStudent Lounge Dedicated

New SoC Director

Director’s Message

Alumni Profile:Michael Chang

Center for ParallelComputing at Utah

New EAE: MGSProgram

Tom Fletcher Receives NSF Career Award

Intersectio: A Kinetic Art Connection

Al Davis Appointed as New Director of the SoC

University of Utah’s EAE Programs Ranked Top 10 in the US

On March 1st, GamePro Media and the Princeton Review named their top 10 undergraduate and top 10 graduate schools for video game design study.  

The Princeton Review, known for its annual “best” college rankings, developed its 2nd annual “Top Schools for Video Game Design Study” list with  GamePro, which reaches more than three million gamers each month and is considered one of the most respected publications in the video game industry.

The University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts and Engineering (EAE) Program ranked 2nd in undergraduate programs and the EAE: Master Games Studio ranked 6th in the graduate programs. This is an outstanding achievement for the school considering the undergrad program was created in 2007 and the graduate program in 2010.

There is a new face in the director’s office; Al Davis was recently appointed the new director of the School of Computing. Davis replaced Martin Berzins who served 5 years in the position. As part of the new change, Davis appointed two Associate Directors, Ellen Riloff and Ross Whitaker to help assist with many of the duties necessary in running the school.

New Undergraduate Student Lounge Dedicated

The School of Computing is please to announce the completion of a new undergraduate student lounge in the Merrill Engineering Building. The new 1200 square foot space will give undergrad students a place to study, relax and interact with one another.

The dedication ceremonies were held on March 16th, when students, faculty and staff packed the halls of the Merrill building to participate in the celebration. The new space was made possible with a generous donation from CS alum John LaLonde. John received his B.S. in computer science from the U in 1989. He is currently the CTO of Abstrax Inc. a software development company located in Tempe, Arizona. John LaLonde and Josh Grant (UofU)

More information about the new undergraduate student lounge on page 2

SPRING 2011

Director’s Messageby Al Davis

On January 1st, I took over from Martin Berzins as the Director of the School of Computing. While it’s clear that I have a lot to learn, I am excited about where we are now. I am even more enthusiastic about the future. Our faculty’s research excellence continues to be recognized through an increased number of publications and new research awards. Our instructional mission has been similarly rewarded with a significant enrollment increase at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Our undergraduate growth projections could be viewed as a problem. Heavier teaching loads on our faculty could compromise both research productivity and course quality. Our plans to recruit new faculty and increase our admissions standards are expected to achieve the opposite result, namely maintain a healthy level of growth, and in turn improve course quality and research productivity.

I’m pleased to report that our relatively new programs in entertainment arts and engineering (EAE) have recently been highly ranked by the Princeton Review and GamePro Media. The EAE program is an interdisciplinary effort between the

School of Computing and the Department of Film and Media Arts. The undergraduate program has been ranked second and the graduate program has been ranked sixth. Close collaboration between artists and computer scientists in the EAE program has been cited as a key component in achieving these prestigious rankings. As the “success breeds success” cliché goes, we look forward to even more talented students entering these programs in the future.

We are currently engaged in a near unprecedented search for a large pool of new, faculty members, six to be precise, in the following areas: formal verification of highly parallel systems, management and analysis of extreme scale data, databases, visualization, robotics, and digital media. Our success in this effort will be critical to the School’s future in that all of these areas are rapidly increasing in their importance and they add depth to existing areas of excellence and increase our ability to specialize in areas where we do not currently have critical mass. This is certainly an exciting opportunity for our School’s future.

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“I felt I received the best education money could buy when I was at the U.   At the time no one else provided the blend of rigorous theory and practical application.   It allowed me to hit the ground at a full sprint.   I believed it was my moral obligation to give back to an institution that treated me so well.  Hopefully this lounge will create an environment that will allow students to weave a strong social fabric and network that can be a springboard to help each other create new industries and paradigms that will change the world.   I would only ask that they then remember the institution that served them so well.”

John LaLonde (BS ‘89)

The new undergraduate student lounge features :

- large whiteboard space- comfortable seating- study areas - TV w/ Xbox console- fridge and microwave- “Coming Soon” a custom made shuffleboard table

SPRING 2011

Alumni ProfileMichael Chang

The Teapot catches up with Mike Chang. co-founder of Cloudpic a small start-up company based in California.

Utah Teapot: Tell us about your first interests in computer science.

Mike Chang: Ever since elementary school, I knew I always wanted to do something with computers. I just didn’t know exactly what. When I arrived at the U, the (relatively new at the time) Computer Engineering department appealed to me. I thought the mixed education in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering would help give me the most options while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do.

UT: What do you remember about your time at the U?

MC: I specifically remember, Pete Shirley’s HCI class, Lee Hollaar’s networking class and Erik Brunvand’s hardware class. They were extremely challenging and also very engaging. Larry Sadwick also was a great mentor and helped supervise my Senior Project.

When I wasn’t in class, I spent most of my time on the Ultimate Frisbee field. I played on a team made up of mostly CS professors and grad students. I remember the CS team dominating intramurals and surprising teams that thought we would be easy pickings.

UT: You had somewhat of a non-traditional college experience, is that right?

MC: I did. Just as I was starting at the U, I started my first job working at XMission. I was one of the first employees at the company. This was a wonderful opportunity as Pete Ashdown (who studied Computer Science at the U) took me under his wing and allowed me to really expand my horizons.

While I was working at XMission I found it more and more challenging to concentrate on my schoolwork. Most of my time was spent at XMission or on the Ultimate Frisbee field. My education began to really suffer.

XMission was growing leaps and bounds. My “part-time” job was more like a full-time job. I didn’t have the maturity to balance everything. In 1995, I got a phone call from Pacific Data Images (PDI) asking if I would be interested in interviewing for a job there.

I ended up finishing the quarter at the U, and left to join PDI as a Systems Administrator. Two weeks prior to my joining PDI, they announced a multi-picture deal with DreamWorks. Suddenly I was thrown into another situation of massive growth of a company. When I started at PDI there were less than 100 employees. Fifteen months later there were over 350.

The systems group at PDI was really small. We started with 2 full time staff and 1 part time Mac specialist. I remember sitting

in a boardroom at SGI next to Ed McCracken (CEO of SGI at the time) discussing their latest computers and thinking that I was way over my head.

UT: Somehow you made it back to the U to finish, is that correct?

MC: Yes, eventually I decided to return to the U to finish my degree. I realized that if I didn’t go back, that I would probably never go back. So I re-matriculated and took as many classes as I possibly could. I remember being so busy at times that I would fall asleep in the CADE lab. Spring of 1998 was particularly bad. That was when the men’s basketball team made it to the NCAA tournament finals, and that the Utah Jazz

made it to the NBA finals that year. I wanted to watch all the games, however juggling 4 CS and 2 EE classes in one quarter really made that impossible. I managed to graduate in December of 1998.

UT: And what have you been up to since leaving Utah?MC: I returned to PDI in the fall of 1999 as a Technical Director

and eventually the Lead Technical Director in the Commercial and Feature Effects group. I worked on TV Commercials and visual effects for films. During that time, I worked on over 50 commercials and 15 film projects including Minority Report, A.I., and Mission Impossible 2. Just prior to PDI’s success with Shrek in 2001, PDI became a subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation (DWA).

I left PDI in 2002 when the Commercial and Feature Effects division was shutdown to focus on Feature Animated projects (Shrek 2 at the time). I moved to Oslo, Norway for a year hiatus.

I kept in close touch with colleagues at DWA and did some contract work for what ended up being the groundwork for the short-lived NBC show: Father of the Pride.

In 2003, I moved to Los Angeles and rejoined DreamWorks Animation as the Head of Global Pipeline. I was responsible for getting DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, CA and PDI/DreamWorks in Redwood City, CA onto the same toolset and with the same workflow.

Eventually we created a new department called Production Technology and I managed a department that was responsible for support, tools and workflow throughout the entire studio. I helped worked on and staffed such films as: Shark Tale, Madagascar, Over The Hedge, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon.

Today, Mike lives in Los Angeles with his wife, he works for Cloudpic, a small start-up company he co-founded along with Richard Chuang (co-founder of PDI), Tim Yiu, and David (grue) DeBry (math ’11). The company builds software and solutions for distributed content creation.

SPRING 2011

BACKGROUND

The story of scientific progress begins with a period of initial denial followed by a wholehearted embrace of the new that leaves the old in a wake of obsolescence. This is how we have moved on to embrace ink jet printers and electronic submission of conference papers, leaving behind their dot matrix counterparts and late night drives to the airport post office. In almost all cases, the new technology was full and complete, and there was no vital missing piece after its adoption.

The current transition from sequential to parallel and concurrent programming, however, follows a less than perfect storyline. For a very long time, it has been abundantly clear to computer system manufacturers that the steadily increasing clock frequencies and the corresponding increase in processor energy consumption cannot be sustained. As early as the 1990s, some early pioneers had foreseen various avenues forward: multi microprocessor solutions forecast by Patterson, the NESL functional algorithm design and programming approach by Blelloch; and work stealing runtimes by Leiserson, to name a few. Microprocessor manufacturers took another decade before shifting their roadmap toward parallel computing, meanwhile performing heroic acts of hardware design. For example, in 1993, the Pentium-2 was clocked at a “whopping’’ 67 MHz. The DEC Alpha that was introduced soon thereafter ran at over a gigahertz. It drew 10 amps of current—50 amps during clock switching— with its clock driver having an effective width of 20 inches! Clearly these trends, as well as many others such as deep pipelines and excessively speculative execution schemes burned more energy without commensurate performance gains.

Unfortunately, after this period of denial and rapid forward lurch toward parallelism, we have several crucial pieces missing. We have yet to develop good organizational principles for parallel computation; we have very weak methods to ensure their correctness; and we have a whole confused legacy of languages and libraries that must still be used because of their wide adoption, but they have many drawbacks with respect to their use in a parallel computing context. In this sense, the progress’’ toward parallel programming has unfortunately emerged more as a belated admission, exposing the decades of neglect in languages, API and compiler design, and pedagogical methods that must now accelerate to catch up with the changing hardware realities. Addressing this acceleration is precisely the goal of the Center for Parallel Computing (CPU).

THE CENTER FOR PARALLEL COMPUTING AT UTAH

Given the inexorable increase in the demand for computing power and energy efficiency, all areas of computer application must now embrace parallel computing. This affects applications ranging from weather prediction done by powerful supercomputers, data storage on Cloud Computing facilities that are often larger than a dozen football fields, Science and Engineering research that is conducted on multi-million dollar supercomputers; all the way to desktop computers and even to personal communication devices (e.g., “phones”) that are being sold in counts of billions. The whole approach to programming these computers must change. We must invent new ways to develop the electronics underlying these computers. We must develop and teach new parallel programming approaches best suited for each problem type. Application scientists who ignore these trends will find that their existing codes will become slower with each generation of processors, unable to exploit the shared memory multicores and vector/accelerator hardware units that will be the norm in the coming years.

An important aspect of the aforementioned crises is that successfully addressing them not only requires Computer Scientists but also application developers. These researchers and engineers specialized in various branches of engineering and natural sciences must collaborate with the computer scientists. Together, they stand the only chance to meet the growing computational demands and various societal demands such as for communication and privacy. The Center for Parallel Computing(CPU) is directed toward fostering these collaborations.

Given that future innovations in parallel computing will occur

The Center for Parallel Computing at Utah (CPU)

Architecture of ISP: Dynamic Formal Verifier for MPI programs

SPRING 2011

at the seams between areas, we fully expect collaborative projects to be launched between members of the CPU. The CPU will also launch seminar series as well as pilot classes experimenting with new curricular approaches. The recently concluded MSR/CPU Distinguished Lecture Series [*1] and the Practical Parallel and Concurrent Programming pilot course [*2] are indicative of more to come. CPU’s academic mission will include a strong emphasis on developing and disseminating new curricular material such as PPCP. There is an acute shortage of information on parallel programming techniques, verification techniques, and performance evaluation/tuning techniques. CPU will maintain a prominent web presence where educational resources in these areas will be maintained. It will also form an external advisory board comprised of members from various local and national/international industries.

We invite you to follow the activities of CPU at its website [*3] and become involved by attending meetings sponsored by CPU as well as suggesting avenues for further impact. The more we can push on this front, the more our students and fellow researchers will truly benefit from timely knowledge and derive benefits in selecting their future careers that are perfectly aligned with future academic and industrial needs. The research of the CPU members is supported by grants from NSF, DARPA, DOE, SRC, Microsoft, HP and Intel. Equipment grants from Nvidia, Oracle, and Xilinx.

[*1] www.cs.utah.edu/events/CPUDLS[*2] research.microsoft.com/ppcp[*3] www.parallel.utah.edu

MEMBERS

Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Professor Director, Center for Parallel Computing at UtahSchool of Computing

Rajeev Balasubramonian, Associate ProfessorSchool of Computing

Martin Berzins, ProfessorSchool of Computing

Mary Hall, Associate ProfessorSchool of Computing

Mike Kirby, Associate ProfessorSchool of Computing

Matt Might, Assistant ProfessorSchool of Computing

John Regehr, Associate ProfessorSchool of Computing

Julio Facelli, ProfessorDept. of Biomedical Informatics

James C. Sutherland, ProfessorDept. of Chemical Engineering

AFFILIATED MEMBERS

Al Davis, ProfessorSchool of Computing

Erik Brunvand, Associate ProfessorSchool of Computing

Steve Corbato, Director of CyberinfrastructureOffice of Information Technology

Matthew Flatt, Associate ProfessorSchool of Computing

Eric Eide, Project Engineering ManagerSchool of Computing

Gianluca Lazzi, ProfessorDept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Tim Ameel, ProfessorDept. of Mechanical Engineering

Milind D. Deo, ProfessorDept. of Chemical Engineering

SPRING 2011

In the fall of 2010, we admitted our first cohort of students in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Master Games Studio (EAE: MGS), an interdisciplinary master’s program with three tracks: game engineering, game arts, and game production.  Students in the game engineering track are awarded the M.S. in Computing degree from the School of Computing, while students in the game arts and production tracks are awarded the MFA degree from the Department of Film and Media Arts.  The EAE: MGS program operates during fall and spring semesters over two consecutive years in a cohort model where the students remain together throughout the entire program. All students in each of the three tracks have a series of common classes including game design, rapid prototyping, pre-production, and final project. The students also have courses that focus on the specialty of each of the tracks. These classes are exclusive to the students enrolled in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Master Games Studio. Also each track has a concentrated set of explicit electives to choose from the School of Computing, Film

and Media Arts, and other departments on campus. The last semester requires a professional level internship, an internal internship, or an individual research project. Completion of the program requires 39 credits for the game engineering track and 52 credits for the game arts and production tracks.

Entertainment Arts and Engineering (EAE) is an interdisciplinary program between the School of Computing

New Entertainment Arts and Engineering : Master Games Studio

and the Department of Film and Media Arts.  The focus is on where computers and art meet in areas such as video games, computer animation, and special effects.  EAE began back in 2007 as an undergraduate emphasis (EAE:Emphasis).  Students from Computer Science and Film take classes together every semester from their freshman through senior years, collaborating and working on interdisciplinary projects.  EAE:Emphasis culminates in a year-long senior project where large teams of students construct a video game from inception through commercial release.

For infomation about the EAE program go to www.eae.utah.edu

SPRING 2011

Alan Humphrey, a current grad student placed second overall in the Student Research Competition at Supercomputing 2010 where he entered his poster on a Graphical Explorer of MPI programs. He was awarded a plaque at the SC’10 awards ceremony. Congratulations to Alan!

Chris Johnson was honored with the IEEE Visualization Career Award.

Guido Gerig was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

FACULTY

STUDENTS Tom Fletcher Receives NSF Career Award

Tom Fletcher recently received a 5 year, $400,000 NSF CAREER award. This award will be used to develop nonlinear statistical models and classification procedures for time-varying shape and investigate their application to biomedical image analysis problems. Tom will work with collaborators at the Brain Institute to apply these methods to further our understanding of developmental disorders such as Autism and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Tom is part of the SCI Institute and a USTAR faculty member.

Tom Fletcher

Art Meets Engineering : A Collaborative Show of Kinetic Art

The Gittins Gallery in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah was alive with kinetic art from February 1-11, 2011. The show was entitled “Intersectio” (Latin for “the intersection of”) and involved both engineering and fine art students.  The students were involved in an innovative course in Embedded Systems and Kinetic Art designed and taught by professors Erik Brunvand from the School of Computing and Paul Stout from the Department of Art and Art History. Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion, sound, or light for its effect. The kinetic aspect is often regulated using microcontrollers connected to motors, actuators, transducers, and sensors that enable the sculpture to move and react to its environment. An embedded system is a special-purpose computer system (microcontroller) designed to perform one or a

few dedicated functions, often reacting to environmental sensors. It is embedded into a complete device including hardware and mechanical parts rather than being a separate computer system.

In this project-based class computer engineering students work together with art students to build collaborative kinetic art pieces. Kinetic art using embedded control is a marriage of art and technology:  creative design and engineering design are both required for a successful art piece. Fifteen collaborative kinetic sculptures were installed for Intersectio including a motor-controlled moving wooden ribbon, a machine that dropped sheets of paper from the ceiling, an animated eye that followed the viewer, “talking” boxes holding an animated conversation, and a large (30 ft) acrylic bicycle chain that updated scrolling text information when turned. 

News

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EDITOR & DESIGN: CHRIS COLEMAN

May 7, 2011Graduation

July 15-19, 2011CAV 2011 - Snowbird, UT