Research

My research focuses on accelerating graph algorithms and sparse linear algebra kernels using the Graphics Processing Unit’s (GPU) parallel architecture.

Software-Define Hardware (DARPA)

My current project is a collaboration between UC Davis, NVIDIA, and several other universities as part of DARPA’s Software-Defined Hardware (SDH) program within the Electonics Resurgence Initiative (ERI). In short, the ERI seeks to continue advances in computer technology in the post-Moore’s-Law era. Within the ERI, the SDH program’s goal is to explore reconfigurable computer architectures and programming models optimized for big-data fields such as graph analytics, machine learning, and linear algebra.

More details about this project coming soon…

DARPA Press Release
Nvidia Press Release

Gunrock

Gunrock is a GPU-accelerated graph algorithm library developed by Dr. Owens’s research group.

I implemented the Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS) web page ranking algorithm. The goal of the HITS algorithm is to assign websites with a hub score and an authority score. Websites with high hub scores are sites that are useful as search engines (example: Google), while sites with high authority scores are websites that contain authoritative information (example: Wikipedia). My Gunrock implementation of HITS is used in NVIDIA’s RAPIDS cuGraph open-source data analytics library.

Source

More specifically, sites that point to other websites with high authority scores have a high hub score, and websites pointed to by other sites with high hub scores in turn have a high authority score. (Code)

I presented a Poster on Gunrock at the UC Davis 2018 Industrial Affiliates Conference.

Other contributions include general Gunrock documentation, bug fixes, and tests.

Past Projects

Past research projects include:

• Design and characterization of a planar air-bearing platform used for CubeSat guidance & control tests at NASA JPL (Link)
• Simulation of distributed detection algorithms applied to chemical plume emissions using autonomous robotic swarms at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Link)
• Design of a low-cost data capture system for fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy with Professor Diego Yankelevich and Professor Laura Marcu at UC Davis (Link)