The People of MeSsAGE Lab

On this page... (hide)

Staff

David Abramson

David Abramson

Professor Abramson has been involved in computer architecture and high performance computing research since 1979. Previous to joining Monash University in 1997, he has held appointments at Griffith University, CSIRO, and RMIT. At CSIRO he was the program leader of the Division of Information Technology High Performance Computing Program, and was also an adjunct Associate Professor at RMIT in Melbourne. He was also a program manager in the Co-operative Research Centre for Intelligent Decisions Systems and the Co-operative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems.

Abramson is currently an ARC Professorial Fellow; Professor of Computer Science in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia, and associate director of the Monash e-Research Centre.

Abramson has served on committees for many conferences and workshops, and has published over 150 papers and technical documents. He has given seminars and received awards around Australia and internationally and has received over $3.6 million in research funding.

He also has a keen interest in R&D commercialization and consults for Axceleon Inc, who produce an industry strength version of Nimrod, and Guardsoft, a company focused on commercialising the Guard relative debugger.

Abramson’s current interests are in high performance computer systems design and software engineering tools for programming parallel, distributed supercomputers and stained glass windows.

Blair Bethwaite

Blair Bethwaite

Blair is a Monash Computer Science graduate who joined MeSsAGE Lab in 2006, he has also working with Monash's Optimization and Constraint Solving group in conjunction with the library and in e-Learning. A full-time MeSsAGE Lab employee for two years Blair has worked on a variety of projects within the lab. He has a wide range of Nimrod and Grid computing experience and does much of the user support, testing and system administration within the group. Current projects and areas of interest include improvements to Nimrod back-end services, coupling these with rich and extensible web clients, and cloud computing. He also looks after the East cluster of the EnterpriseGrid and provides Grid support to the other sites.

Colin Enticott

Colin Enticott

Colin is currently employed as a research scientist by the MeSsAGE Lab group at Monash University, Melbourne. His research focus is in the area of Grid Computing and Workflow Management and he has recently started a PhD. Colin is also a project member on the Nimrod ARCS Proto-NeAT project. Previous projects include the Nimrod Portal, the Nimrod Java API and deploying Nimrod on GrangeNet. Colin's background is varied so he has spent a lot of time helping MeSsAGE Lab people and Nimrod users. The PhD will change this.


Slavisa Garic

Slavisa Garic

Slavisa Garic holds an Honours Degree in Computer Science. He began work on Nimrod upon the completion of his studies in 2002. Since then he has worked on the development of Nimrod/G toolkit and has been the core developer of the Nimrod back-end services within MeSsAGE Lab. He has extensive experience in working with current Grid middleware toolkits as well as relational database systems such as PostgreSQL.


Rob Gray

Rob Gray

Rob is an Economics graduate and his career before working at Monash included economic research, banking, corporate planning and small business. He joined DSTC at Monash in 1999 and in 2002 transferred to a similar role with DSSE and Monash Cluster Computing, which led on to MeSsAGE Lab. At Monash he has worked all the time in research support.



Donny Kurniawan

Donny Kurniawan

Donny completed his PhD in 2008. Donny's PhD project was in the area of development tools for grid computing. His thesis was entitled: An Integrated Framework for Grid Application Development. His interests are grid development tools, IDEs, Eclipse, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, Erlang, and Ruby (not necessarily in that order. Donny has also had a Research contract with MeSsAGE Lab since October 2008, working on a Debugging project.

Tom Peachey

Tom Peachey

Tom Peachey is a mathematician with research interests in image processing, operations research, computer based learning, optimization and the operator aspects of traditional analysis. He now develops the more mathematical facets of the Nimrod toolset: Nimrod/O, which implements a variety of optimization routines, and Nimrod/E, used to design efficient parametric experiments. He is the lead developer for Nimrod/O and Nimrod/E

Jeff Tan

Jeff Tan

Dr Jeff Tan is a Lecturer with the Caulfield School of Information Technology (CaSIT), Monash University. He completed his PhD in 2004 on the topic of "Using Domain Specific Metamodels for Semi-Automatic Schema Mapping". In respect of Research, Jeff is presently working with Professor David Abramson on the Nimrod project, focusing on security issues surrounding the deployment of Nimrod and Grid applications in general. Details of his sub-project, Remus, are described on Jeff's web page, along with other technical topics that are not enitrely related to Remus.

HDR students

Shahaan Ayyub

Shahaan is a final year PhD student supervised by Prof Abramson. His area of research is in Efficient Adaptive Scheduling in Dynamic Grid-Workflows. This work involves developing scheduling techniques for the deployment of these classes of applications on the Grid where the data-dependencies not only involve primitive data-units (such as files) but also, direct pipes. This concept is an extension of the GridFiles concept, which involves inter-process communication based on file abstraction.

Philip Chan

Philip Chan

Philip is a PhD student at the School of IT, Monash University under the supervision of Prof David Abramson and is also working with Monash eResearch Centre. His research interests include: parallel programming techniques, distributed shared memory, and concurrency. His other research interests include: process migration, deadlock detection and handling, distributed load balancing/sharing, replicated procedure calls. Prior to coming to Monash University, Philip was a lecturer (with the rank of Assistant Professor) at the Software Technology Department, College of Computer Studies, De La Salle University - in the Phillipines.


Ngoc Minh Dinh

Ngoc Minh Dinh

Minh is a PhD student who does part-time research in MeSsAGE Lab. Minh's Honours thesis investigated how the process of medical imaging can be enhanced by creating a Grid based environment in which the microscope systems are connected with multiple high performance clusters and several mass storage spaces. He has done further research in this area with MeSsAGE Lab but his Phd is in the area of Scaleable Debugging.

A.B.M Russel

A.B.M. Russel

ABM Russel is the eResearch Project Leader for VeRSI. Russel leads, mentors and manages the eResearch use-cases and applications development team of software engineers at VERSI. VERSI Home Page He is also completing a Computer Science PhD in high performance computational Grids for scientific instruments and sensors in the Monash University Faculty of IT.

He achieved a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) in Computer Science and Engineering at MANIT followed by a Master of Applied Science (Networked and Distributed Systems) in Information Technology at RMIT. Russel has also had considerable academic and research experience at RMIT, VPAC and Monash ITS.

Alumni

Rajkumar Buyya

Assoc. Prof Rajkumar Buyya was a PhD student at Monash and completed in 2002, his topic being "Economic Based Distributed Resource Management and Scheduling for Grid Computing" Since 2003 Raj has been at University of Melbourne and is an Associate Professor and Head of The Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory, University of Melbourne, known as the GRIDS Lab


Kam Man (Clement) Chu

Clement Kam Man Chu is a veteran of software development in Monash University but has now moved to CSIRO. He graduated with Bachelor of Computing at Monash University specializing in Object Oriented Systems Development in 2001. He took a further year on an Honours Degree and achieved First Class Honours. At Monash Clement was an Eclipse committer on the Parallel Tools Platform project. In this project, his tasks involved GUI and scalable debugging development to extend Eclipse framework to support controlling, developing and debugging parallel applications on cluster machines. Before this project, he had been integrating Guard relative debugger into various IDEs such as IBM Eclipse, IBM WebSphere and Sun Microsystems NetBeans.

Clement's technical interests are in parallel debugging, UI design, software development, web development and open source.


Wojtek Goscinski

Dr Wojtek Goscinski completed his Phd in 2007 and has also been working on projects with ITS and the Monash eResearch Committee (MeRC). The PhD thesis was related to development of a Grid-oriented application deployment service and entitled "IDEA - An Infrastructure for the Deployment of eScience Applications"


Tim Ho

Dr Tim Ho completed his PhD in 2007 and has moved to CSIRO. His PhD was entitled: "The Design and Implementation of an Active Data System." Tim is now Application and User Support Specialist at CSIRO's Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) team.


Jagan Kommineni

Jagan did a Masters at Monash whilst working as a researcher for the GriddLes project and has now moved to the Joint ProteomicS laboratory JPSL and in particular the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. His masters was completed in 2003 and covered "Dynamic Reconfiguration of Grid Workflows Using Web Services"


Andrew Lewis

Dr Andrew Lewis has had numerous areas of his research published jointly with MeSsAGE Lab researchers and David Abramson supervised his PhD. His PhD topic was "Parallel Optimisation Algorithms for Continuous, Non-Linear Numerical Simulations", School of Computing and Information Technology, Griffith University, May (2004).He is Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Griffiths University in Brisbane.

Tirath Ramdas

Tirath Ramdas completed his PhD in 2008 and had been working as a Research Assistant with MeSsAGE Lab for six months with focus on Nimrod-Kepler Work Flow development and the Opti Portal project involving Leica and Monash Micro Imaging. Tirath relocated overseas by April 2009 and is working with Prof Kim Baldridge in Zurich - Prof Baldridge is a long-time associate of MeSsAGE Lab.

Nam Tran

Dr Nam Tran completed his PhD in 2005 which was entitled: "Language Neutral Behavioural Contracts for Binary Components" He is now with an IT start-up company in his native Vietnam.

Greg Watson

Dr Greg Watson finished his Phd in 2001. His topic was "The Design and Implementation of a Parallel Relative Debugger" and Greg has been involved in the roll-out of Guard. Greg is now a Senior Software Engineer in the High Productivity Tools group at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. He is Project Leader for the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (an Eclipse Foundation project) and is currently developing tools for High Productivity Computing Systems based on the Eclipse platform.

Prior to working for IBM, Greg was Team Leader of the Cluster Research Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he participated in the Science Appliance and LinuxBIOS projects.