Anton Wijs receives Amazon Research Award and NWO ENW-M grant
15-Sep-2022
Dr. A. Wijs (Eindhoven University of Technology) has recently received both an Amazon Research Award and an NWO ENW-M grant. The award, in the area of Automated Reasoning, provides unrestricted funds and Amazon Web Services (AWS) promotional credits. The grant provides funding for a PhD student and a scientific programmer.
Both the grant and the award will be used to focus on computational tasks such as model checking (to check the correctness of software), reliability engineering (predicting and preventing system failures) and automated planning (realizing execution strategies). These computations frequently rely on the construction of so-called state spaces. These state spaces are directed graphs, and they tend to be enormous for industrial-sized problems. The team of Wijs will investigate how graphics processors (GPUs) can be used to massively accelerate state space construction and analysis. Previously, Wijs pioneered in demonstrating that GPUs can accelerate this type of computation hundreds of times. The main challenge is that GPUs, although computationally very powerful, are vastly different from Central Processing Units, requiring the development of new algorithms.
In the ENW-M project, titled “GAP: GPU Accelerated Probabilistic Model Checking of Information and Communication Systems”, the PhD student will work on techniques that enable the use of GPUs for the analysis of probabilistic systems, such that failures can be detected in unreliable hardware and message loss can be identified in communication channels. The programming-intensive research will be supported by a scientific programmer. The Amazon Research Award will be used to focus on particular aspects relevant for this research, such as data compression techniques and support for distributed (multi-GPU) computing. In addition, AWS enables large-scale testing of the new techniques.