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In January, 2010, IBM selected Prof. Chandra Krintz to be a recipient of the 2010 IBM X10 Innovation awards. These awards recognize “a select group of academic research and curricular development activities in the area of computing at scale on cloud computing platforms based on the X10 programming language”[1]. The 2010 awardees consist of 18 top academics in the area of programming languages world-wide.

Prof. Krintz’s project will integrate the X10 language into her group’s open-source cloud computing platform, AppScale. AppScale emulates the functionality of the popular Google commercial cloud. Specifically, AppScale implements the Google App Engine (GAE) open APIs and provides an infrastructure and tool-set for distributed execution of GAE applications over virtualized clusters and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) systems (including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the open-source implementation of the AWS interface, Eucalyptus — also from UCSB’s computer science department). By leveraging existing cloud APIs and web-service technologies, AppScale is familiar, easy to use, and is able to execute existing GAE applications using private cluster resources as well as IaaS systems. Prof. Krintz and her students will investigate (i) how to best employ x10 within AppScale for more efficient parallelization of AppScale components, and (ii) how to expose x10 to GAE application writers for efficient parallel computation of tasks within the cloud. More information about AppScale can be found at http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu.

[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/innovation/index.html