Research Fellow Position in Kelvin Living Lab for Sustainability

We have a research fellow position.

Please visit the following link for full description and applying: https://hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=098532NfiX&WVID=6273090Lgx&LANG=USA

Deadline: 15/07/2024

For more information about the Kelvin Living Lab project, please refer to: https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/dipsa/the-kelvin-living-lab/

QClique: Optimizing Performance and Accuracy in Maximum Weighted Clique – Euro-Par 2024

30th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par 2024)

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-69583-4_7
PDF Version

Abstract

The Maximum Weighted Clique(MWC) problem remains challenging due to its unfavourable time complexity.In this paper, we analyze the execution of exact search-based MWC algorithms and show that high-accuracy weighted cliques can be discovered in the early stages of the execution if searching the combinatorial space is performed systematically.

Based on this observation, we introduce QClique as an approximate MWC algorithm that processes the search space as long as better cliques are expected. QClique uses a tunable parameter to trade-off between accuracy vs. execution time and delivers 4.7-$82.3 time speedup in comparison to previous state-of-the-art MWC algorithms while providing 91.4% accuracy and achieves a parallel speedup of up to 56x on 128 threads.

Additionally, QClique accelerates the exact MWC computation by replacing the initial clique of the exact algorithm. For WLMC, an exact state-of-the-art MWC algorithm, this results in 3.3x on average.

Code

https://github.com/DIPSA-QUB/QClique

Four Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Positions

Deadline: 26/02/2024

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Distributed Computing

https://hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=844083M0Nn&WVID=6273090Lgx&LANG=USA

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Emerging Computing Technologies

https://hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=566107M0HD&WVID=6273090Lgx&LANG=USA

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in High Performance Computing

https://hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=128409M0GW&WVID=6273090Lgx&LANG=USA

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Programming Languages & Compilers

https://hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=125161M0Gm&WVID=6273090Lgx&LANG=USA

Accelerating scientific discovery using domain adaptive language modelling (PhD Thesis)

Thesis on QUB Pure Portal
Thesis in PDF Format

Author: Dimitrios Christofidellis

Research has been conducted for numerous centuries but recent advances in technology have facilitated and accelerated the process keeping the research budget and the required effort at manageable levels. Scientific and technical corpora, such as papers and patents, are great written sources of already existing research knowledge and information. The abundance of such documents, in addition to their exponential growth, set them as a unique source of knowledge offering a great opportunity to push the research boundaries even further. Yet, this information’s volume and growth rate are so large that it is unmanageable for researchers to study all of it. Realizing the potential of incorporating this knowledge efficiently into the discovery process and that the recent advances in the NLP domain provide us with a powerful methodological base, our work aims to establish methods that can speed up parts of the discovery process relying on scientific and technical corpora. We focus on but do not limit our work on patent corpora as methods to leverage such documents in discovery pipelines are limited so far. Our contributions focus on three specific cases: the domain definition of a given corpus in the form of a metagraph; the domain definition of a given corpus in the form of keywords, focusing on the patent classification case; and the semi-automated reporting of a discovery artifact in the form of a patent. In all three cases, we rely on transformer-based Language Models and adhere to domain adaptive techniques to achieve our goals by providing efficient methods in terms of both performance and needed training/inference requirements. Concluding our work, we discuss the importance of our contributions. We demonstrate how our proposed methods can be incorporated into discovery pipelines, combined, and complement existing methods. We conclude with a discussion of promising future directions derived from our work.

Three PhD Positions in Data Analytics – RELAX Doctoral Network

We have 3 recruitment opportunities in a Marie Curie Doctoral Training Network on data analytics. These are PhD opportunities with a research assistant contract:

(1) Application-Aware Relaxed Synchronisation for Distributed Graph Processing, (offered)
(2) Interactive and intelligent exploration of big complex data, (offered) and
(3) Efficient and Responsible Analytics for Urban Mobility and Allied Applications (offered).

Application Deadlines
7 May 2023

RELAX Doctoral Network
The RELAX Doctoral Network brings together 5 cross-disciplinary research groups working across data science, data management, distributed computing and computing systems to pursue a fundamentally new approach to this problem by leveraging the semantics or correctness conditions of applications, with the goal of enhancing scalability, response times, and availability. The Doctoral Network provides a bespoke technical and non-technical training programme and fosters cross-disciplinary and third-party collaborations.

Funding Information
This project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant number EP/X029174/1.

To be eligible for consideration for a RELAX Doctoral Candidate position (covering tuition fees and a basic salary with pension of approx. £33,001 per annum), a candidate must satisfy all the eligibility criteria based on transnational mobility and academic qualifications. The Studentship is open to all nationalities.

Applicants MUST be doctoral candidates, i.e. not already in possession of a doctoral degree at the date of the recruitment (understood as the recruitment call deadline) and undertake transnational mobility (see mobility rule below). Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but who have not yet formally been awarded the doctoral degree will not be considered eligible.

Mobility Rule
Researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the United Kingdom for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before their date of recruitment. Compulsory national service, short stays such as holidays, and time spent as part of a procedure for obtaining refugee status under the Geneva Convention are not taken into account.

Academic Requirements
The minimum academic requirement for admission is normally an Upper Second Class Honours degree from a UK or ROI Higher Education provider in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent qualification acceptable to the University.

More Information
Applicants may additionally consider applying to positions with the partner universities of the network: http://www.relax-dn.eu/

Parallel Computing Training Session 2023

Date: 6th March 2023
Location: CSB Training Room 02.017

Parallel computing is a key technology supporting high-performance computing (HPC) and data analytics. The goal of this module is to provide an overview of parallel computing and introduce attendees to prevailing programming models. The expected outcome of this module is that participants will have an understanding of the different languages and approaches used in this domain and that they will be able to construct simple parallel programs using the discussed languages.

Theoretical lectures and practical training will be dispensed by Hans Vandierendonck, Romain Garnier, Syed Ibtisam Tauhidi, Amir Sabbagh Molahosseini, and Zohreh Moradinia. A general overview of High performance computing will be presented in the morning by Romain Garnier and Amir Sabbagh Molahosseini following by lab classes using practical examples with OpenMP. In the afternoon Syed Ibtisam Tauhidi and Zohreh Moradinia will present how to efficiently handle data analytics with Hadoop and Spark.

ASCCED: Asynchronous Scientific Continuous Computations Exploiting Disaggregation

UKRI EPSRC Grant

The design of efficient and scalable scientific simulation software is reaching a critical point whereby continued advances are increasingly harder, more labour-intensive, and thus more expensive to achieve. This challenge emanates from the constantly evolving design of large-scale high-performance computing systems. World-leading (pre-)exascale systems, as well as their successors, are characterised by multi-million-scale parallel computing activities and a highly heterogeneous mix of processor types such as high-end many-core processors, Graphics Processing Units (GPU), machine learning accelerators, and various accelerators for compression, encryption and in-network processing. To make efficient use of these systems, scientific simulation software must be decomposed in various independent components and make simultaneous use of the variety of heterogeneous compute units.

Developing efficient, scalable scientific simulation software for these systems becomes increasingly harder as the limits of parallelism available in the simulation codes is approached. Moreover, the limit of parallelism cannot be reached in practice due to heterogeneity, system imbalances and synchronisation overheads. Scientific simulation software often persists over several decades. The software is optimised and re-optimised repeatedly as the design and scale of the target hardware evolves at a much faster pace, as impactful changes in the hardware may occur every few years. One may thus find that the guiding principles that underpin such software are outdated.

The ASCCED project will fundamentally change the status quo in the design of scientific simulation software by simplifying the design to reduce software development and maintenance effort, to facilitate performance optimisation, and to make software more robust to future evolution of computing hardware. The key distinguishing factor of our approach is to structure scientific simulation software as a collection of loosely coupled parallel activities. We will explore the opportunities and challenges of applying techniques previously developed for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) to orchestrate these loosely coupled parallel activities. This radically novel approach will enable runtime system software to extract unprecedented scales of parallelism and to minimise performance inefficiencies due to synchronisation. Additionally, based on a speculative execution mechanism, it will uncover parallelism that has not been feasible to extract before.

The computational model proposed by ASCCED will, if successful, initiate a new direction of research within programming models for high-performance computing that may dramatically impact not only the performance of scientific simulation software, but can also reduce the engineering effort required to produce efficient scientific simulation software. It will have a profound impact on the sciences that are highly dependent on leadership computing capabilities, such as climate modeling and cancer research.

ROMA: Run-Time Object Detection To Maximize Real-Time Accuracy

This is a follow-up work on TOD, which selects one of multiple deep neural networks (DNNs) to perform real-time video analytics (object detection) on low-end devices, e.g., on the camera itself. TOD uses the median object size to determine which one out of 4 YOLO DNNs will meet the real-time requirement best, with respect to object size and speed of the objects. TOD requires specific knowledge of the device to select appropriate thresholds on the median object sizes, and needs to be retuned for each computing device.

ROMA removes the limitation that TOD imposes by performing a more detailed analysis of the image content. In particular, ROMA separately estimates the impact of the selected DNN on object size and on object speed. Its formulation is sufficiently flexible to adapt to changes in the computational power of the device such that it does not need to be retrained when migrating across hardware. Moreover, this way, ROMA can adapt to runtime changes in computational power, which may arise from power management features on the device, or from other workloads which share the device. ROMA does however have hyper-parameters that are dependent on the YOLO DNNs.

ROMA will be presented at the 2023 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV).

You can read the post-print on arXiv.