New Semester, New Faces
The new semester is here, and we’re excited to welcome three new colleagues and roll out a clear plan for the months ahead.
New faces. Lax joins as a first-year Ph.D. student. Ryan just completed his M.S. in our lab and begins his Ph.D. this semester. Abby joins as a first-year M.S. student. We’re glad to have them on board!
Each semester we adjust our routines and schedules to keep the lab running smoothly and to support a diverse team. This semester we’re trying a few new approaches. Colin will organize our weekly team talks with a schedule planned about a month ahead, host practice sessions for conference presentations, and invite remote guests for ~30-minute Zoom talks and discussion. Jin will handle outreach and support: a short blog every Tuesday, cross-posting to LinkedIn and other channels, encouraging GitHub Discussions as a support path, and serving as the first responder for incoming technical questions. Saiful will lead the website migration to a Jekyll site on GitHub, move over most existing content, convert prior posts into native Jekyll, and switch our papers database from PHP + database to a JSON dataset. Ben, the most experienced and supportive engineer who knows every line of the codebase, will guide release engineering: review PRs and give feedback, prioritize and maintain issues, keep integration tests in working order, and plan and ship regular software releases.
This semester, alongside our long-standing systems research, we will explore practical ways to pair our work with LLMs. For example, improving developer documentation, identifying code invariants, visualizing logs, and troubleshooting workflows. Ground rules: you are responsible for your output; do not create extra work for others; use ND-authorized tools such as Gemini and Gemini-CLI to protect data. This week each person will pick a modest task and tool to explore. Next week we will report on methods, results, and observations.
Project highlights.
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CMS Computing (Barry, Jin, Ben, Alan): keep the current TaskVine release stable and usable; share successes with the HEP community; publish the new cms-taskvine-example repository; advance an IPDPS/TPDS paper on dynamic data reduction.
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NSF CSSI Floability (Saiful, Abby, Ben): keep the release stable, usable, and documented; attach straightforward data handling for existing applications; grow users and collaborations; build interactive visualization of notebook workflows to support troubleshooting and performance; then extend the approach to new notebook and workflow models.
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NSF Consistency Contracts (Colin + Jin): complete and release the basic toolchain to measure, summarize, and enforce; choose baseline techniques that exploit application behavior.
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DOE XGFabric (Ryan, Thanh): capture the full software stack; port to multiple ACCESS sites and troubleshoot issues as they appear; evaluate scale, responsiveness, and resource use; develop solutions for HPC batch queue delays.
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NSF HARMONY: run a fall workshop on workflow collaboration with the eScience conference; capture examples across Parsl-TaskVine (astro), DaskVine (HEP), and RADICAL (xgfabric).
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NASA-SADE (Lucas, Lax): demonstrate the simulation infrastructure at the September Year 2 review; evaluate OS scalability and performance; begin integrating native SADE components.
We’ll post a short update every Tuesday and syndicate it to LinkedIn and other channels. Questions and ideas are welcome on GitHub Discussions.
Author: Jin Zhou (jzhou24@nd.edu)
Lab PI: Douglas Thain (dthain@nd.edu)
Lab Website: https://ccl.cse.nd.edu/
GitHub: https://github.com/cooperative-computing-lab/cctools
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