Introduction

Our 35 faculty members teach and do research in a wide variety of areas, including

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational Biology
• Computer Architecture
• Computer Networks
• Database Systems
• Mathematical Programming
• Numerical Analysis
• Operating Systems
• Parallel and Distributed Computing
• Performance Analysis
• Programming Languages
• Theory of Computation

This issue of our annual report summarizes many of the accomplishments of the past academic year. Highlights include:

• A survey by the National Research Council ranked us as one of the "top ten" computer science departments in the country.

• The research funding of the Department grew by 38% and exceeded $7.6 million in 1994-95.

• Several faculty members received important national awards and appointments. Professors Lawrence Landweber and Mary Vernon were named Fellows of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Professor Landweber was also appointed President of the Internet Society. Professor David DeWitt received the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award for his contributions to database systems.

• A new Assistant Professor, Pei Cao, was hired. Professor Cao received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her research interests include operating systems, computer architecture, and parallel and distributed systems.

• Professor John Strikwerda received the Department's Excellent Educator Award, Francis Salmon was named the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, and Alvin Lebeck was chosen as the Outstanding Graduate Student Researcher. Professor David Wood was honored by the student chapter of the ACM as the Students' Choice Professor of the Year.

• Corporate donations have continued at a high level, reflecting the quality and joint objectives of our relationships with industry. Since September 1994 we have received support worth over $8 million from our industrial sponsors. In particular, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle provided major donations.

• The fifth annual J. Barkley Rosser Memorial Lecture was given by R. T. Rockafellar of the University of Washington, Seattle. His talk was titled "Optimization, Computers, and Mathematics." These lectures are given in memory of Professor Rosser, who served the University of Wisconsin and our Department with distinction.

Educational Program

Our faculty continually modernize their courses, a necessity in a rapidly changing field like computer science. One notable recent improvement was the conversion to C++ in Introduction to Data Structures (CS 367), as well as much of Algebraic Language Programming (CS 302). Also, several new classes for non-majors were created recently: Introduction to Computer Programming (CS 110), Problem Solving using Computers (CS 310), and Introduction to Database Management Systems (CS 364).

Our Undergraduate Projects Laboratory (UPL) provides state-of-the-art equipment and allows undergraduates to explore projects of their own interest. Especially notable are the impressive computer graphics that the students produce.

The local student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (SACM) is open to all Computer Sciences students. SACM sponsors a fall orientation program for new graduate students, several social and sports events during the year, the department photo board, and financial aid for conference registration fees. Funds for these activities are raised through soda sales to department members from a computerized vending machine.

Each year the Department sponsors a special colloquium series that brings leading researchers to campus. This series complements our regular weekly seminar programs. The 1995-96 program is partially sponsored by the AT&T Foundation.

Distinguished Lecturer Series - Spring 1996

Ronald DeVore, University of South Carolina

Wavelet-Based Image Processing

Joan Feigenbaum, AT&T Bell Labs

Managing Trust in Large Networks

Christos Papadimitriou, UC-Berkeley

Complexity as Metaphor

Jong-Shi Pang, Johns Hopkins

Complementarity in Engineering and Economics

Alex Pentland, MIT

Smart Rooms: Machine Understanding of Human Action

Jack Dongarra, Oak Ridge National Lab.

Recent Work in Parallel Algorithms for the Linear Algebra

Faculty Research Programs

The Department performs research in a wide variety of areas of computer science and receives funding from government agencies, industrial companies, and private foundations. Several of the Department's largest research projects are described below.

• The PRISM Project is supported by the Computer Science Department's third Institutional Infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation. This grant, consisting of $2 million from the NSF matched by approximately $0.9 million from the University, was awarded to the Department in June 1991. Using these funds, the PRISM project purchased a Thinking Machines CM-5 and created the Wisconsin Cluster Of Workstations (COW). Our CM-5 system now has 64 processors with vector units and 32 megabytes of memory per processor; its peak processing power is 8 billion floating point operations per second. COW is a parallel computer constructed from 40 Sun SparcStation-20 workstations connected by a high-speed network; each workstation has two processors, 64 megabytes of memory, and two gigabytes of disk space.

  Our state-of-the-art parallel supercomputers support experimental research projects in a variety of areas of computer science. Specific topics under investigation include the design of scalable persistent object stores, development and evaluation of parallel programming models, evaluation of next generation parallel architectures, parallel compilers and performance debugging tools, numerical methods for large-scale optimization, machine learning algorithms for computational biology and space science, modeling of viscous fluid dynamics, modeling of radiation hydrodynamics and radiative transfer, and numerical methods for simulating atmospheric and oceanic flows. The latter three topics are under investigation by University of Wisconsin scientists and engineers who are collaborating with computer science researchers in the development of solutions to Grand Challenge problems.

• Most future massively-parallel computers will be built from workstation-like nodes and programmed in high-level parallel languages - like HPF - that support a shared address space in which processes uniformly reference data. The Wisconsin Wind Tunnel project, directed by Professors Hill, Larus, and Wood and funded by NSF and ARPA, seeks to develop a consensus about the middle-level interface - below languages and compilers and above system software and hardware. Their first proposed interface was Cooperative Shared Memory, which is an evolutionary extension to conventional shared-memory software and hardware. More recently, they are exploring a more revolutionary interface called Tempest. Tempest provides the mechanisms that allow programmers, compilers, and program libraries to implement and use message passing, transparent shared memory, and hybrid combinations of the two. They are developing implementations of Tempest on our Thinking Machines CM-5 and the Department's Cluster of Workstations (COW). The Wisconsin Wind Tunnel project is so named because their tool, particularly an execution-driven simulation system that runs on a Thinking Machines CM-5, allows project members to cull the design space of parallel supercomputers in a manner similar to how aeronautical engineers use conventional wind tunnels to design airplanes. For more information, see URL http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~wwt/ or email wwt@cs.wisc.edu.

• The Paradyn Parallel Program Performance Tools project, headed by Professor Miller and funded by ARPA and DOE, is exploring new approaches to building scalable tools for performance measurement. Paradyn uses a new technique, called dynamic instrumentation, to insert, remove, and change program instrumentation while a program is running. Paradyn includes automated decision support to control this instrumentation. The system has the ability to present performance data from high-level parallel languages in terms of high-level language constructs or low-level machine structures.

• The objective of the ARPA-funded SHORE project - led by Professors Carey, DeWitt, Naughton, and Solomon - is to design, implement, and evaluate a persistent object system that will serve the needs of a wide variety of target applications including hardware and software CAD systems, persistent programming languages, geographic information systems, satellite data repositories, and multimedia applications. SHORE expands on the basic capabilities of the widely-used Exodus Storage Manager (developed at Wisconsin, funded by ARPA) in a number of ways including support for typed objects, multiple programming languages, a "Unix-like" hierarchical name space for named objects, and a Unix-compatible interface to objects with a "text" field. This interface is intended to ease the transition of applications from the Unix file system environment to SHORE, since existing Unix tools such as vi and cc will be able to store their data in Shore objects without modification.

• The Center for Parallel and Applied Optimization, headed by Professors Mangasarian, Meyer, and Ferris, was established with a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 1989. It is also supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. The center's faculty and students conduct research on theoretical and computational aspects of parallel optimization, with emphasis on applied problems arising in such diverse fields as medical informatics, economic and traffic equilibrium, and domain decomposition.