Toronto Networking Seminar


Organized by Department of Computer Science and
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto






Communication Theory in the 
Cloud


A Joint Event with the Toronto Chapter of the IEEE 
Communications Society





Matthew C. Valenti


Lane Department of Computer Science and 
Electrical Engineering

West Virginia University

 




Friday, October 30, 3pm

Location: BA 1210 



Abstract:




  With the advent of Cloud 
  Computing, it is now feasible for even small research groups to apply massive 
  computing power to the solution of hard problems. For instance, accurate Monte 
  Carlo simulations may be rapidly executed in parallel using grid computing 
  technology, and systems with large design spaces may be efficiently optimized 
  with evolutionary computing techniques.

  

  Under funding by the National Science Foundation, West Virginia University is 
  developing an open infrastructure for the execution of communication-theory 
  related tasks on a massive public grid computer. When completed, the project 
  will feature a web-based interface that will allow researchers from around the 
  world to easily run jobs on a computing cloud that we maintain. Casual users 
  can run jobs without needing to write a single line of code by using a Matlab-based 
  library developed at WVU called the Coded-Modulation Library (CML), while 
  authorized expert users may run their own custom code. Rather than relying on 
  dedicated computing resources, the project is based on the idea of community 
  computing, whereby participants in the project contribute idle cycles on their 
  ordinary desktop computers by running a low-priority background process (for 
  linux) or screensaver (for windows). 

  

  In this talk, an overview of our Cloud Computing infrastructure will be 
  presented. We will discuss an approach for creating a community-computing grid 
  and a methodology for running code written in Matlab on the grid. In addition, 
  several case studies will be presented showing how the computing grid may be 
  used to optimize communication waveforms. In particular, we show how massive 
  simulation and genetic algorithms may be used to optimize: (1) coded 
  continuous-phase modulation (CPM) waveforms, (2) label mapping and signal 
  design for bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM), and (3) dispersion 
  matrices for space-time block codes (STBCs).

 



Bio:



Matthew 
C. Valenti has been with West Virginia University since 1999, where he is 
currently an Associate Professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and 
Electrical Engineering. He holds BS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering 
from Virginia Tech and a MS in Electrical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins 
University. From 1992 to 1995 he was an electronics engineer at the US Naval 
Research Laboratory. He serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on 
Wireless Communications, was a co-chair for the Wireless Communications 
Symposium at ICC-2009 (Dresden, Germany), and is a co-chair for the 
Communication Theory Symposium at ICC-2011 (Kyoto, Japan). His research 
interests are in the areas of communication theory, error correction coding, 
applied information theory, wireless networks, simulation, genetic algorithms, 
and grid computing. His research has been funded by the National Research 
Foundation and the Department of Defense.

 





Host of Talk:



  Raviraj Adve (rsadve@comm.utoronto.ca)