One year ago, Luke Logan presented MegaMmap at SC'24, introducing a software distributed shared memory system that makes datasets larger than available DRAM accessible through familiar programming interfaces. The core problem it addresses has only grown more relevant since.
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the 27th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC 2025), held in Exeter, UK on August 13, 2025. The talk was titled "From Parallel Computing to Concurrent Data Access: The Dataflow under von Neumann Machine Approach."
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the 5th Workshop on Performance Engineering, Modeling, Analysis, and Visualization Strategy (PERMAVOST 2025), held in conjunction with ACM HPDC 2025 on July 20, 2025. The talk was titled "Dataflow under the von Neumann Machine: A New Paradigm for Computing Systems."
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the 37th International Conference on Scalable Scientific Data Management (SSDBM 2025), held in Columbus, Ohio on June 24, 2025. The talk was titled "The Data-Centric Imperative: from Hermes to StoreHub." Dr. Anthony Kougkas, Executive Director of GRC, serves as General Chair of SSDBM 2026.
Professor Xian-He Sun gave an invited talk at HPC Asia 2025 in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on February 20, 2025. The program (opens in a new tab) lists the talk as "Dataflow under the Von Neumann machine: A Destructive New under Existing Systems."
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing (NPC 2024), held in Haikou, China on December 7, 2024. The talk was titled "Hermes, Coeus, and ChronoLog: Some big data I/O systems for network, parallel and distributed computing."
Presented at SC24 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis November 17 to 22, 2024 • Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Available Now MegaMmap is released as open-source software. Visit the GitHub repository (opens in a new tab)
At SC24, Luke Logan presented MegaMmap, a software-based distributed shared memory (DSM) technology that blurs the boundary between memory and storage. Developed by Luke Logan, Anthony Kougkas, and Xian-He Sun, MegaMmap lets data-intensive applications work with datasets larger than available DRAM through memory tiering, prefetching, and coherence optimization.
Luke Logan presenting MegaMmap research at SC24
The Gnosis Research Center and Dr. Manish Parashar's group at the University of Utah are working together to bring IOWarp to the National Data Platform (opens in a new tab) (NDP). The collaboration is not separately funded; it grows out of shared interest in agentic data management for open science.
On August 5, 2024, the National Science Foundation awarded the collaborative Frameworks grant "IOWarp: Bending the I/O Fabric for Advancing AI-Infused Scientific Workflows". GRC leads the project under award OAC-2411318 (opens in a new tab), with Dr. Xian-He Sun as PI and Dr. Anthony Kougkas and Dr. Gerd Heber (The HDF Group) as co-PIs. The University of Utah is the partner institution under award OAC-2411319 (opens in a new tab), led by Dr. Jacob Hochhalter with Dr. Vivek Srikumar. Both awards run from August 2024 through July 2029.
On June 26, 2024, DFTracer v1.0.0 (opens in a new tab) was released. DFTracer is a data flow tracer for deep learning and AI-driven workflows, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by a team led by SCS Lab alumnus Dr. Hariharan Devarajan, with GRC co-authors on its SC'24 paper.
ChronoLog 1.0.0 (opens in a new tab) is now available. This is the first public beta release of ChronoLog, and we are eager to get your feedback.
From May 6 to May 9, 2024, the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing (CCGRID) (opens in a new tab) was held in Philadelphia, USA. On May 7, Professor Xian-He Sun, a distinguished professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and director of the Gnosis Research Center, delivered a keynote titled "AI & Data: Challenges and Opportunities in Computer System Research."
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the 25th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC 2023), held in Melbourne, Australia on December 13, 2023. The talk was titled "Data Centric Computing: an I/O System Approach."
The International Open Benchmark Council (BenchCouncil) lists "CARE Cache Management" by Xiaoyang Lu and Xian-He Sun of Illinois Institute of Technology among its Chip100 Top Chip Achievements for 2022-2023 (opens in a new tab). The list was online by December 7, 2023, the date of its earliest archived copy (opens in a new tab). BenchCouncil describes the evaluation report as open for comments and subject to revision.
After two decades of research in scalable computing and data-centric systems, the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) Laboratory became the Gnosis Research Center (GRC) at Illinois Institute of Technology on April 23, 2023. This post introduces the center.
The Department of Energy's FAIR program has announced an award to Illinois Tech (opens in a new tab) for "DTIO: Enabling Computational Storage using Data-Tasks and Asynchronous I/O", with Dr. Xian-He Sun as PI.
Dr. Xian-He Sun has been named to the ICPP Wall of Fame as one of the top 50 contributors in the first 50 years of the International Conference on Parallel Processing.
On April 18, 2023, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent 11,630,834 B2 (opens in a new tab), "Label-Based Data Representation I/O Process and System", to Illinois Institute of Technology. The inventors are Anthony Kougkas, Hariharan Devarajan, and Xian-He Sun, and the patent covers the label-based I/O method behind LABIOS, which received the Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award at HPDC'19.
On March 6, 2023, the Hermes team at the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) Lab and The HDF Group published Hermes v0.9.8-beta (opens in a new tab), a beta of the heterogeneous-aware, multi-tiered I/O buffering system first described at HPDC'18.
The DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research has selected Coeus in its 2022 data management awards (opens in a new tab). Coeus is a collaborative project of Illinois Tech (Dr. Xian-He Sun), Sandia National Laboratories (Dr. Jay Lofstead), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Dr. Scott Klasky).
The Michigan State University College of Engineering has presented Professor Xian-He Sun its Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (opens in a new tab), at a ceremony on May 7, 2022.
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the 13th International Photonics and Optoelectronics Meetings (POEM 2021), Workshop on Information Storage System and Technology (ISST), on November 8, 2021. The talk was titled "High Performance Data Access: The Hermes Approach."
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility has announced DLIO, the deep learning I/O benchmark developed by researchers at ALCF and the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) Lab at Illinois Tech. The benchmark is maintained in ALCF's GitHub organization (argonne-lcf/dlio_benchmark).
The National Science Foundation has awarded a collaborative CSSI Framework grant (OAC-2104013) for ChronoLog, a distributed and tiered logging system designed for exascale high-performance computing systems and large-scale data centers.
The paper "DLIO: A Data-Centric Benchmark for Scientific Deep Learning Applications" has received the Best Paper Award (First Prize) at the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing (CCGrid'21). The work, authored by Hariharan Devarajan, Huihuo Zheng, Anthony Kougkas, Xian-He Sun, and Venkatram Vishwanath, introduces a benchmarking framework that exposes the I/O bottlenecks hidden in deep learning training pipelines.
Illinois Tech has appointed Dr. Xian-He Sun, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, as the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair in Computer Science, as announced on December 16, 2020 (opens in a new tab). The chair is named for Ron Hochsprung, an Illinois Tech alumnus.
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the 13th CCF National (Advanced) Computer Architecture Conference (ACA 2020) on August 13, 2020. The talk was titled "Data Flow under the von Neumann Computer Architecture."
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the International Conference on High Performance Big Data and Intelligent System (HPBD&IS 2020) on May 23, 2020. The talk was titled "dLABEL: A Label-Based Data Representation and its implementation on Big Data I/O Systems."
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a plenary keynote at the National Annual Conference on High Performance Computing (HPC-China 2019), held in Hohhot, China on August 22, 2019. The talk was titled "High Performance Data Access: the DMSH approach."
The paper "LABIOS: A Distributed Label-Based I/O System" has received the Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award at the ACM 28th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC'19). The award, named in honor of the late Professor Karsten Schwan for his contributions to high-performance systems, recognizes the most outstanding paper presented at the symposium.
Professor Xian-He Sun delivered a keynote at the ACM Turing Celebration Conference, China (ACM TURC 2019), SIGMOBILE symposium, held in Chengdu, China on May 19, 2019. The talk was titled "Data Access of Big Data: Solving the system bottleneck."
The National Science Foundation has awarded a Framework Grant (OAC-1835764) to Dr. Xian-He Sun for the Hermes project, a heterogeneous-aware multi-tiered distributed I/O buffering system designed to address the growing performance gap between computing power and storage systems.
The IEEE has elected Dr. Xian-He Sun, chair of the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Tech, to its class of 2011 Fellows "for contributions to memory-bounded performance metrics and scalable parallel computing," as Illinois Tech announced on January 5, 2012 (opens in a new tab). Fellow is the IEEE's highest grade of membership, held by approximately 0.1 percent of its voting members.
