I have moved to Colorado School of Mines. Please visit my current home page at
http://alamode.mines.edu/~xliu/.
Education
Research Interests
I'm generally interested in parallel and distributed systems,
computer networks, wireless ad-hoc networks, parallel discrete-event
simulation, high-performance computing, performance modeling and
analysis of computer architectures, communication systems, and
wireless ad-hoc networks.
My doctoral thesis research is on parallel discrete-event
simulation of the global Internet and wireless ad-hoc networks. A
contribution of my work is the design of efficient synchronization
algorithms and high-performance modeling techniques for simulating
large-scale complex systems.
I find it immensely interesting and challenging to apply advanced
simulation and modeling techniques for solving problems inherent in
large and complex systems. These problems, such as the Internet worm
propagation, only manifest themselves when the scale of the system
reaches a certain level. The difficulty involved in reproducing the
aggregate phenomena in simulation studies prompts my research in the
direction of integrating advanced parallel simulation techniques and
different modeling abstractions.
Here're my publications,
and some of my talks.
Research Projects
- Project MOSES
(Modeling of Security and Systems) focuses on modeling and simulation
of large-scale systems and their security properties. iSSF
is the simulation kernel used by MOSES; it's the next generation of
DaSSF (see below), for high-performance parallel and distributed
simulations. We're including real-time emulation and human-interaction
capabilities into the SSF framework.
- DaSSF (Dartmouth Scalable
Simulation Framework) is a high-performance parallel simulator for
large and complex systems. We investigate advanced parallel
synchronization techniques to achieve DaSSF's performance goal in both
speed and memory efficiency. DaSSF supports a wide variety of Unix
platforms, capable of running on both shared-memory multiprocessors
and distributed-memory networks of workstations. It has been used by
many researchers for simulations of computer architectures,
communication networks, parallel image processing, wireless cellular
systems, and mobile ad-hoc networks.
- DaSSFNet is a
high-performance network simulator. It is a C++ implementation of SSFNet, which offers a collection of
simulation components designed for simulating communication
networks. DaSSFNet is implemented based on DaSSF, capable of running
on both shared-memory and distributed-memory platforms. DaSSFNet
features small memory footprint and parallel simulation capability,
making itself amenable to very large network models. Here is one
large network model we
came up with based on real measurements.
- Dartmouth
SWAN (Simulator of Wireless Ad-hoc Networks) is a high-performance
simulation framework of large-scale mobile ad-hoc networks. Our goal
is to provide a reasonably realistic simulation environment to test
protocol designs and study vulnerabilities in large-scale wireless
ad-hoc networks. We use parallel simulation techniques to achieve
speed and overcome memory limitations. SWAN is in the active
development and validation phase.
- Other (smaller) projects:
- Load balancing for parallel simulations on shared-memory
multiprocessors.
- Modeling network multicast algorithms using optimistic
parallel simulation.
- Simulation of threaded parallel applications using
message-passing interface.
- Binary executable profiler/instrumentation for MIPS
architecture.
Professional Activities
- Member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society.
- Served as reviewer for the following publications:
- Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS).
- IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).
- International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation
of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS).
- European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN).
- I'm organizing a weekly group meeting, called
Simulation Actionables (restricted
access), for brainstorming
research ideas, browsing the literature, checking progress,
and exercising our presentation skills.
- Looking for more ;-)
Personal
Name Issue: Most people call me using my Americanized name
Jason, as it's much easier to pronounce and remember. And I use
it on most of my publications. Yet my official first name is
Xiaowen. I've heard only a few of my non-Chinese friends ever
call me that. To be honest, I don't care which you use to call me, as
long as you get it right.
You can send me encrypted email using my
public key.
Jason Liu
Last modified: Mon Feb 23 13:59:54 CST 2004
