Wei-Jen Wang Ph.D. Department of Computer Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th Street Troy, New York 12180, USA Email: wangw5 (at) cs dot rpi dot edu

[Education] [Areas of research interest] [Current research] [Publication] [Related links]

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, December 2006
  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA
  Advisor: Carlos A. Varela

• M.S. in Computer and Information Science, June, 1999,
  National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.
  Advisor: Shyan-Ming Yuan

• B.S. in Computer and Information Science, June, 1997,
  National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.
  Project Advisor: Shyan-Ming Yuan

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Areas of Research Interest:

• Distributed Programming Technology

• Distributed Garbage Collection

• Generic Distributed Scientific Computing

• Practical Internet/Grid Applications

• Distributed Computing Models

• Innovative Education Technology

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Research (2002-2006):

• Distributed Garbage Collection for Mobile Active Objects (Actors):

  • Objective: To provide a non-intrusive, scalable distributed garbage collection framework for mobile actor systems

  • Current availability:

    • Definition and formalization of actor garbage

    • Transformation between the actor garbage problem and the passive object garbage problem

    • A new marking algorithm (the n-color algorithm) for actor garbage collection

    • A new non-blocking, non-FIFO reference listing algorithm (the pseudo-root approach).

    • A new distributed snapshot algorithm for actor garbage collection.

    • An implementation in SALSA programming language 1.0.0 or a later version.

  •  Contribution: The emergence of distributed programming languages introduces the need of non-intrusive, scalable distributed mobile active object garbage collection algorithms which give abstraction to grid/pervasive application development, promoting code quality and improving resource management. Existing algorithms depend on either FIFO or blocking communication, or both, while our algorithm does not.  

• A Middleware Framework for the Maximum Likelihood Evaluation (MLE) Problem:

  • Objective: To provide a generic MLE framework to fit large data set over dynamic grids

  • Current availability: MLE for partial wave analysis (Physics) with static load-balancing

  • Contribution: MLE is a common technique in many areas, such as Physics, Astronomy, Biology, ... etc. Our framework can help researchers with little computer science knowledge to do MLE analysis over a dynamic grid computing environment. For example, running the MLE application over 100-1000 connected computing nodes. 

• Development of the Actor-Oriented Programming Language, SALSA

  • Objective: To support research on a dynamic reconfigurable grid/pervasive computing environment

  • Current availability: SALSA 1.1.0 with a tutorial. See http://wcl.cs.rpi.edu/salsa/.

  • Contribution: To help grid/pervasive computing research; for teaching the actor model.

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Publication:

Ph.D. thesis

Wei-Jen Wang. Distributed Garbage Collection for Large-Scale Mobile Actor Systems. PhD thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2006. http://wcl.cs.rpi.edu/papers/wangweijenphd.pdf

Articles in journal

1. Liu, E. Z. F., Lin, S. S. J., Wang, W. J., & Yuan, S. M. (2001). Albatross III: A WWW-based course support system. International Journal of Instructional Media, 28(4), 363-374.(EBSCO database)

Conference articles

1. 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.
2. Wei-Jen Wang and Carlos A. Varela. Distributed Garbage Collection for Mobile Actor Systems: The Pseudo Root Approach. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing (GPC 2006), volume 3947 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Taichung, Taiwan, pages 360-372, May 2006. Springer.

Technical reports

1. Wei-Jen Wang and Carlos A. Varela. A Non-blocking Snapshot Algorithm for Distributed Garbage Collection of Mobile Active Objects. Technical report 06-15, Dept. of Computer Science, R.P.I., October 2006.
2. Wei-Jen Wang and Carlos A. Varela. Distributed Garbage Collection for Mobile Actor Systems: The Pseudo Root Approach. Technical report 06-04, Dept. of Computer Science, R.P.I., February 2006. Note: Extended Version of GPC'06 Paper.
3. Wei-Jen Wang and Carlos A. Varela. A Non-Blocking Reference Listing Algorithm for Mobile Active Objects --- the Pseudo-Root Approach. Technical report 07-05, Dept. of Computer Science, R.P.I., February 2007.
4. Carlos A. Varela, Gul Agha, Wei-Jen Wang, Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Jason LaPorte, Abe Stephens, Robin Toll, and Gregory Haik. The SALSA Programming Language 1.1.3 Release Tutorial. Technical report 07-07, Dept. of Computer Science, R.P.I., March 2007.

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Related Links:

• Research:
  • Garbage collection:
    • Richard Jones' Garbage Collection Homepage: Richard Jones is the author of the text book "Garbage Collection: algorithms for automatic dynamic memory management", which is widely recognized as the best garbage collection book.
    • Fabrice Le Fessant's Distributed Garbage Collection Homepage: The homepage contains related links of distributed passive object garbage collection.
    • SALSA Programming Language Tutorial: The link provides the SALSA 1.1.0 Tutorial, including an introduction of the actor model and the definition of actor garbage. 
  • Grid/Pervasive Computing:
    • World-Wide Computing Laboratory: The research group I am working with.
    • The Globus Alliance: The Globus Alliance is a community of organizations and individuals developing fundamental technologies behind the "Grid" by the Globus Toolkit, which is an open source software toolkit used for building Grid systems and applications.
    • Legion: A Worldwide Virtual Computer: Legion is an object-based, meta-systems software project at the University of Virginia. The system addresses key issues such as scalability, programming ease, fault tolerance, security, site autonomy, etc.
    • IOS: The Internet Operating System (IOS) is a distributed middleware framework that provides support for dynamic reconfiguration of large-scale distributed applications through opportunistic load-balancing capabilities, resource-level profiling and application-level profiling.
    • Grid Computing Info Centre: It contains lots of useful information, including links to open forums, related grid systems and toolkits, applications, ...
  • Distributed Programming Languages and Libraries:
    • Java: Java is one of the successful programming languages ever.
    • SALSA: SALSA (Simple Actor Language System and Architecture) is a general-purpose actor-oriented programming language, especially designed to facilitate the development of dynamically reconfigurable open distributed applications.
    • Oz: Oz supports declarative programming, object-oriented programming, constraint programming, and concurrency as part of a coherent whole. It is developed for the Mozart Programming System.
    • Nomadic Pict: Nomadic Pict is based on the calculus to enable experiments with distributed algorithms and agent computing. It is an extension of Pict with the notion of locations, agents, migration, distribution, and failures.
    • JoCaml: JoCaml is an experimental extension of the Ocaml language with the distributed join-calculus programming model. It includes high-level communication and synchronizing channels, mobile agents, failure detection and automatic memory management.
    • MPI: MPI is a library specification for message-passing, proposed as a standard by a broadly based committee of vendors, implementers, and users.
    • PVM: PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer.
    • ProActive: ProActive is a GRID middleware (a Java library with Open Source code under LGPL license) for parallel, distributed, and concurrent computing, also featuring mobility and security in a uniform framework.
  • Maximum Likelihood Estimation (or Maximum Likelihood Evaluation, MLE):
    • Maximum Likelihood Definition: A definition from Wikipedia.
    • Partial Wave Analysis: A collection of links for partial wave analysis.
    • Particle Physics Data Grid: The Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG) Collaboration has deployed, used and extended production Grid systems vertically integrating experiment applications, Grid technologies, Grid and facility computation and storage resources to provide effective end-to-end capabilities.
    • Grid Physics Network: The GriPhyN Project is developing Grid technologies for scientific and engineering projects that must collect and analyze distributed, petabyte-scale datasets.
    • Bioinformatics Application download, Helix System at NIH: Lots of bioinformatics application are available, including some MLE applications.

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Worldwide Computing Laboratory

Department of Computer Science

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Updated 3/21/2007