Research Interests

• I have worked in the area of parallel simulation since its inception and have developed synchronization and load balancing algorithms belonging to both of the churches of parallel simulation-conservative and optimistic. The use of techniques from artificial intelligence for load balancing has characterized our recent work.
• Two areas for which we developed synchronization and load balancing algorithms were gate level chip simulations and gravitational n-body simulations. Gate level parallel simulation contains a summary of the work we did on parallel Verilog simulation. We developed a parallel environment for gate level simulation which incorporated the algorithms which we developed. Gravitational N-Body simulation is used to study a wide reange of astrophysical models ranging from the dynamics of galaxies and globular clusters containing 10**6 stars to planetary systems with dozens of bodies. We introduced a discrete event approach to solve the equations of motions for the bodies as a replacement for the more expensive (and traditional) time stepping approach for their solution.
• Over the past several years I have been working on the use of parallel simulation in computational neuroscience. We collaborated with the NEURON (www.neuron.yale.edu) group at Yale and developed a parallel discrete-event stochastic simulation tool for reaction-diffusion models of neurons. Stochastic models provide a fine grain view of the chemical reactions at the basis of a neuron's functioning, compared to traditional continuous models which are simulated by differential equations.

Research projects

• Parallel Discrete Event Simulation of Reaction-Diffusion Models in Neurons

Service

• General chair of PADS 2009 and PADS 1995
• Program chair of PADS 1997
• Program co-chair of McSWIM 2000
• Program commitees: PADS 1990-present, DIS-RT 2000,2009,WSC 2009,2003, SIMUTOOLS 2010,MASCOTS 97
• Ediorial board(s) of: Transactions of the Society for Computer Simulation(SCS), Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices
• Guest editor of special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC)
  devoted to applications of distributed simulation (March, 2002)
• Research Grant Reviewer: Israel Science Foundation(2005), US National Science Foundation(2002-3),NSERC(2009,2010)
• Guest editor of special issue of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices (PDCP)
  devoted to distributed simulation (to appear by December of 2001)
• Reviewer for IEEE TPDS, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Communications, JPDC, Distributed Computing, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Simulation

Courses