Staci Smith, David Lowenthal win Best Paper Award at HPDC'21.

June 25, 2021
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Recent Ph.D graduate Staci Smith and her advisor, Professor David Lowenthal, have won the Best Paper Award at the recent High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC'21) conference.  HPDC is one of the premiere conferences in high-performance computing.  The paper authored by Smith and Lowenthal is entitled "Jigsaw: A High-Utilization, Interference-Free Job Scheduler for Fat-Tree Clusters".
 
The paper, based on Smith's Ph.D dissertation research, describes design and implementation of Jigsaw, a new job-isolating scheduler for three-level fat-trees.  Jigsaw proactively enforces network isolation for every job, which completely avoids application performance degradation that would otherwise occur due to inter-job network interference.  Unlike existing job-isolating schedulers, which suffer from lowered system utilization, Jigsaw typically achieves system utilization of 95-96%.  In scenarios where jobs experience even modest performance improvements from interference-freedom, Jigsaw typically leads to lower job turnaround times and higher throughput than traditional job scheduling.
 
The award culminates Smith's decorated Ph.D student career.  Her first paper, "Mitigating Inter-Job Interference Using Adaptive Flow-Aware Routing", was nominated for Best Student Paper at Supercomputing 2018. She also is the recipient of a 2019 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship.  Smith has taken a position as a software engineer at Google.
 
The paper is available here.