Information

The University of Münster (UM) is one of the largest in Germany with over 40.000 students. The research group on Parallel and Distributed Systems (PVS) led by Prof. Sergei Gorlatch conducts an internationally recognised research and development in different areas of Parallel algorithms and systems, High-level programming models, Distributed systems, Internet-based applications, Online games and e-learning, virtual reality, etc. The group comprises 8 members of staff which are actively participating in both the teaching process at the University, as well as research and development within national and international projects, in particular EU-project edutain@grid, NoE CoreGRID, Tempus ITSoftTeam, German SFB 652 Mobil, and others.

Expertise

• In the area of programming models, members of group developed a transformation-based programming systems SAT which exploits and optimises algorithmic skeletons for parallelism.

• In the area of parallel algorithms and multi-core systems, the group is involved in the multidisciplinary German national research project SFB Mobil, where parallel systems are used for accelerating time-critical applications in medical imaging. 

• In the area of Grid computing, the group actively contributes several workpackages of the EU Network of Excellence CoreGRID and the edutain@grid project.

• In the area of distributed systems, the group focuses its research in the area of middleware for interactive real-time applications, in particular multiplayer online games.

Future Work

• UM participates in the proposal for the FP7-ICT-2009-4 call in the area of multi-core systems: “A Skeleton-based holistic platform for multi/many-core technologies (SKOL M²C)”. The SKOL M²C project will establish a novel holistic approach to hardware and software design of multi/many-core platforms, based on employing algorithmic skeletons — generic patterns of computation and communication — to produce correct and efficient multi-core applications.

• UM conducts research on real-time self-adaptive mashup applications in the context of Cloud-Computing.

• UM proceeds investigation of new application areas of the Real-Time Framework, e.g., in Cloud Computing and Infrastructure as a Service context.

• UM conducts research in the area of hybrid computer systems investigating new programming models to exploit performance of these systems.

Edutain@Grid

The PVS group at the University of Münster has been developing the Real-Time Framework (RTF) — a novel, scalable computation and communication infrastructure for ROIA (Real-Time Online Interactive Applications). It is provided to application developers as a C++ library to efficiently design the network and application distribution aspects in the ROIA development process. RTF’s integrated services allow the developers to create scalable applications on a high level of abstraction which hides the distributed and dynamic nature of applications, as well as the resource management and deployment aspects of the underlying resource infrastructure. The high level of abstraction allows RTF to redistribute ROIA during runtime and transparently monitor their real-time metrics.

Sergei Gorlatch is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Münster. He is actively involved in the Network of Excellence CoreGRID and the EU STREP edutain@grid funded by the European Commission, and in the interdisciplinary project on high-performance medical imaging (SFB 656) ”Mobile” funded by the German Research Agency. He is also a grant holder and principal investigator in the EU TEMPUS project ITSoftTeam. Prof. Gorlatch published more than 80 reviewed papers in renowned journals and conferences. His current research area includes parallel algorithms, high-performance programming methodology and formal methods for parallel and distributed systems, especially parallel skeletons, computational Grids and novel kinds of applications including multi-player, Internet-based computer games and multi-core platforms.