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GCN Home > 02/20/06 issue

Wu Feng | New frontiers in high-end computing

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Dr. Wu Feng is one of few government employees whose work has been cited in the book of Guinness World Records. In 2003, Wu and his team at Los Alamos National Laboratory engineered the highest-ever throughput for a sustained long-distance network connection—2.38 Gbps between Los Alamos and Switzerland (the record was broken the following year).

Wu recently left Los Alamos to join the Computer Science Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, where he will help manage the school’s new Center for High-End Computing Systems and head up his own lab.

GCN: How did you first get involved in high-performance computing?

Wu: My doctoral dissertation was on real-time networking. I specialized in the time-sensitive delivery of information. Back in the early 1990s, such timely delivery over the shared Ethernet was not even pseudo-real-time. If you reached 40 percent utilization, the network was pretty much crippled.

In general, for “soft,” real-time networking such as audio and video delivery, “as fast as possible” often sufficed. However, military systems tended to [operate in] what is “hard” real-time. They are hard in the sense that if something doesn’t happen by a given time T, then something bad will happen.

Anyway, I came to the realization in the mid-to-late 1990s that if I shifted my research focus to high-performance networking, and in turn high-performance computing, that I could make broader contributions to society.

GCN: What networking problems did Los Alamos face when you were hired?

Wu: We were looking at mechanisms and policies for high-performance networking. They had expertise in the hardware. What they needed was the expertise in the low-level systems software, specifically to overcome the bottleneck at the host interface. You could put in the fastest network you want, but if you can’t get the information through the host interface and into the machine, then it doesn’t matter how fast your network is.

In the early ’90s, the bottleneck was the operating system. You can view the OS as the middleman. For example, when you type in a Google search, you are not directly putting that information onto the network; the OS is doing it on your behalf. So how do you dramatically improve performance when you have a middleman? Get rid of the middleman.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks



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