Periodically the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will highlight former CI Fellows to showcase their current research. The following was submitted by Dr. Ioan Raicu. 

Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing Innovation Fellow (CI Fellow), Dr. Ioan Raicu, now an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and a research faculty member in the Math and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, focuses on the relatively new distributed systems paradigm called Many-Task Computing (MTC). MTC aims to bridge the gap between two predominant paradigms, namely High-Throughput Computing (HTC) and High-Performance Computing (HPC). His work has focused on defining and exploring both the theory and practical aspects of realizing MTC (with special emphasis on data-intensive computing)  across a wide range of large-scale distributed systems, ranging from many-core systems, clusters, grids, and clouds to supercomputers.  In addition to laying out the foundation for this new sub-field of distributed systems, his work has revolutionized the programming paradigm of future large-scale systems and opened the door to a broader class of applications that would have normally not been tractable at such extreme scales. His work has accelerated both traditional scientific computing applications and the more recent big data applications, and has been shown to scale to real petascale O(10K-nodes) and simulated exascale systems O(1M-nodes).

Dr. Raicu obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Chicago (UChicago) under the guidance of Dr. Ian Foster in 2009. He was a CI Fellow at Northwestern University in 2009 – 2010 working with Dr. Alok Choudhary, which proved to be a highly productive time as he developed the fundamental and novel ideas towards supporting extreme-scale computing through decentralized storage and scheduling systems.  Dr. Raicu considers his time at Northwestern to be extremely valuable (especially from a brainstorming and creativity perspective) as he transitioned from a student to a faculty member, without the added pressure of being a tenure-track faculty member. More recently (2014), he has received the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) Award for Young Achiever in Scalable Computing. This annual international award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of scalable computing within five years of receiving their Ph.D. degree; the long lasting and high impact work that this award is referring to dates back to his early PhD work at UChicago as well as work done at Northwestern as a CIFellow. Dr. Raicu will receive this award at the 2014 Supercomputing Conference (SC’14), the leading conference in the field of distributed systems and high-performance computing.

More information can be found on his website.