Welcome to the Global Computing Lab

The Global Computing Lab (GCLab), headed by Dr. Michela Taufer, targets large-scale, heterogeneous computer systems and their application to the sciences.

Our research focuses on exploring, designing, and implementing alternative, more efficient computational paradigms as well as adaptive methods and user-friendly tools for large-scale simulations on grid computing, volunteer computing. More recently my group has started focusing on GPU-based and multi-core systems.

Our main challenges are:

  1. The ability to model biological systems with computational algorithms that dynamically adapt to simulation results and performance collected at runtime.
  2. The ability to assure that these simulation algorithms can be executed in the "required" time using heterogeneous, error-prone, and volatile computer systems.

The first point refers to the adaptive calibration of prediction models based on the complexity and characteristics of the biological systems as well as, on the availability and reliability of computational resources. The second point refers to having the necessary computational resources (computing cycles, memory, network, etc.) to accomplish the simulation work in the required time and being able to trust the simulation results: these results can be affected by e.g., hardware malfunctions, incorrect software modifications, and floating-point arithmetic with insufficient precision.