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• Research Interests
• Summary of Thesis Research
• Publications
• Other Writings
• Technical Posters
• Public Talks

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in working in the areas of large-scale distributed systems, high performance computing, middleware services, grid computing, resource management, performance modeling and analysis, information management, and decentralized coordination.

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Summary of Thesis Research

My thesis research focuses on devising decentralized middleware-triggered application reconfiguration strategies in dynamic execution environments such as grids and shared clusters. The need for application adaptation mechanisms has become increasingly important as grid computing is gaining more and more importance among the scientific community. To this effect, I was a major contributor of the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel middleware framework for application reconfiguration, called the Internet Operating System (IOS). I also designed and implemented a library that extends message passing (MPI) parallel applications with reconfiguration mechanisms through process migration and/or process split and merge. IOS provides decentralized middleware and application services that automate resource and application profiling, diagnose applications’ performance, and perform load balancing, migration, checkpointing, splitting, and merging of computations in a nearly transparent manner. IOS is currently being used as a Testbed for running real scientific applications in dynamic environments in multi-disciplinary collaborations.

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Publications

Articles in journals or book chapters

1. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis J. Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. The Internet Operating System: Middleware for Adaptive Distributed Computing. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), Special Issue on Scheduling Techniques for Large-Scale Distributed Platforms, 20(4):467-480, 2006. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, James D. Teresco, and Carlos A. Varela. Towards a Middleware Framework for Dynamically Reconfigurable Scientific Computing. In L. Grandinetti, editor, Grid Computing and New Frontiers of High Performance Processing, volume 14 of Advances in Parallel Computing, pages 275-301. Elsevier, 2005. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]

Conference articles

1. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis J. Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Dynamic Malleability in MPI Applications. In Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2007), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2007. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
2. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos Varela. Malleable Components for Scalable High Performance Computing. In Proceedings of the HPDC'15 Workshop on HPC Grid programming Environments and Components (HPC-GECO/CompFrame), Paris, France, pages 37-44, June 2006. IEEE Computer Society. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
3. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Alok Meghranjani, Tamar Eilam, Michael Kalantar, and Alexander V. Konstantinou. Model Driven Provisioning: Bridging the Gap Between Declarative Object Models and Procedural Provisioning Tools. In Proceedings of Middleware 2006, ACM/IFIP/USENIX, 7th International Middleware Conference, Melbourne, Australia, pages 20 pp., November 2006. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
4. Wei-Jen Wang, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, John Cummings, Jim Napolitano, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. A Middleware Framework for Maximum Likelihood Evaluation over Dynamic Grids. In Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, December 2006. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
5. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos Varela. An Architecture for Reconfigurable Iterative MPI Applications in Dynamic Environments. In R. Wyrzykowski, J. Dongarra, N. Meyer, and J. Wasniewski, editors, Proc. of the Sixth International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM'2005), number 3911 of LNCS, Poznan, Poland, pages 258-271, September 2005. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
6. T. Desell, K. El Maghraoui, and C. Varela. Load Balancing of Autonomous Actors over Dynamic Networks. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS-37 Software Technology Track, pages 1-10, January 2004. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
7. K. El Maghraoui, J. Flaherty, B. Szymanski, J. Teresco, and C. Varela. Adaptive Computation over Dynamic and Heterogeneous Networks. In Proc. of the Fifth International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM'2003), number 3019 of LNCS, Czestochowa, Poland, pages 1083-1090, September 2003. [pdf][bibtex-entry]
8. K. El Maghraoui, and Tajje-Eddine Rachidi. Towards building H.323-aware wireless systems: H.323 Control Loops and Applications adaptation to wireless link conditions. In Proc.of the 5th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI 2001). Volume XVI, Pages 106-113, Orlando, Florida, July 2001. [pdf]

Technical reports

1. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis J. Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. Network Sensitive Reconfiguration of Distributed Applications. Technical report 05-03, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Department of Computer Science, 2005. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]
2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Carlos Varela, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Joseph E. Flaherty, and James D. Teresco. A Middleware Framework for Dynamically Reconfigurable MPI Applications. Technical report CS-04-09, Williams College Department of Computer Science, 2004. [pdf] [bibtex-entry]

Thesis

1. Kaoutar El Maghraoui. Towards Building H.323-aware 3G Wireless Systems: Control Loops in H.323-based Multimedia Networks. Masters Thesis, Al Akhawayn University, Morocco, 2001. [pdf]

Work in progress

1. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos Varela. Malleable Applications for Scalable High Performance Computing. Under review for the Cluster Computing Journal.
   Invited for a special issue with the best papers from (HPC-GECO/CompFrame 2006).
    
2. Travis J. Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Applications for Dynamic and Heterogeneous Environments. Submitted to ICDCS 2007.
    
3. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos Varela. A Middleware-centric Approach for Adapting Iterative MPI Applications in Dynamic Environments. To be submitted to the Journal of Grid Computing.

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1. K. El Maghraoui, J. Chabarek, C. Varela, B. Szymanski, and J. Teresco, SALSA_MPI: A Framework for Dynamically Reconfigurable MPI Applications, Workshop on Pervasive Computing and Networking (CPCN04), RPI, Troy, NY, April 2004. [ppt]
    
2. T. Desell, K. El Maghraoui, C. Varela, and B. Szymanski, IOS: A Middleware for Autonomous Worldwide Computing, Workshop on Pervasive Computing and Networking (CPCN04), RPI, Troy, NY, April 2004. [ppt]
    
3. K. El Maghraoui, C. Varela, B. Szymanski, and J. Teresco, Adaptive Parallel Computation over Dynamic and Heterogeneous Networks, Conference on Adaptive Methods for Partial Differential Equations and Large Scale Computation (ADAPT03), RPI, Troy, NY, October 2003. [ppt]