Travis Desell

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Travis Desell

Contact Information

email: travis.desell AT gmail DOT com
students use this email: travis.desell.teaching AT gmail DOT com. I am also available via google talk for course related questions.
office hours: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday 3-4pm. I will be keeping Tuesdays and Thursdays open for appointments, so please feel free to email me to set up an individual meeting time.
office phone: 777-701-3477 [email is the best way to contact me.]

University of North Dakota
Department of Computer Science
Streibel Hall Room 220
3950 Campus Road Stop 9015
Grand Forks, North Dakota 52802-9015

For Students

For any students interested in working with me doing directed study on undergraduate or graduate research projects, I keep an updated list of potential projects here: Potential Research Projects and Directed Studies.

About Me

I am an assistant professor at University of North Dakota, and was previously a post-doctoral researcher and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

I have been the main developer and community liaison of the MilkyWay@Home volunteer computing project from the time of its creation four years ago. MilkyWay@Home is using volunteered computers to determine the origin and structure of the Milky Way Galaxy. Due to my efforts, this project has grown to over 25,000 volunteers from over 150 countries, who are contributing around 800 teraflops of computing power [boincstats.com], and has reached over 1.7 petaflops in the past making it the 3rd fastest computing system in the world at the time. I have also implemented versions of this software which are also currently being used by astrophysicists on RPI's BlueGene/L supercomputer and various cluster computing environments.

In a continuation of my work interacting with the public and developing open source volunteer computing systems, I have begun work on DNA@Home to put this same volunteer computing power to work towards finding protein binding sites in DNA.

I have also been a main contributor in the development of both the compiler and runtime of SALSA, a programming language based on the actor model of computation. SALSA enables easy development of concurrent and transparently distributed applications by following actor semantics.

Courses

  1. Spring 2012 (UND): CS 532 - High Performance Distributed Computing and Paradigms (Course Webpage)

  1. Fall 2011 (UND): CS 161 - Computer Science II (Course Webpage)
  2. Fall 2011 (UND): CS 588 - Data Structures, Algorithms and Software Design (Course Webpage)
  3. Spring 2011 (RPI): Programming in Java (Course Webpage)
  4. Spring 2010 (RPI): Programming in Java (Course Webpage)

Press

  1. PCs Around the World Unite To Map the Milky Way. February 10, 2010. [RPI News] [Science Daily]

Awards

  1. The Robert McNaughton Prize for outstanding graduate studies in computer science. May 2010.

Publications

Theses

  1. Travis Desell. Asynchronous Global Optimization for Massive-Scale Computing. PhD thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, December 2009.
  2. Travis Desell. Autonomic Grid Computing using Malleability and Migration: An Actor-Oriented Software Framework. Master's thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, May 2007.

Book Chapters

  1. Nathan Cole, Travis Desell, Daniel Lombranaa Gonzalez, Francisco Fernandez de Vega, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela. Evolutionary Algorithms on Volunteer Computing Platforms: The MilkyWay@Home Project. In F. Fernandez de Vega, E. Cantu-Paz (Eds.): Parallel and Distributed Computational Intelligence, SCI 269, pp. 63-90. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.
  2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, James D. Teresco, and Carlos A. Varela. Towards a Middleware Framework for Dynamically Reconfigurable Scientific Computing. In L. Grandinetti, editor, Grid Computing and New Frontiers of High Performance Processing, volume 14 of Advances in Parallel Computing, pages 275-301. Elsevier, 2005.

Journal Articles

  1. Travis Desell, Jason LaPorte, Carlos A. Varela, and Gustavo Guevara. Modular Visualization of Distributed Systems. CLEI (Latin-american Center for Inf ormatics Studies) Electronic Journal: Special issue of best papers presented at CLEI'2010. Volume 14, Number 1, Paper 7. April 2011.
  2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Iterative MPI Applications. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, volume 21, issue 3, pages 393-413, March 2009.
  3. Nathan Cole, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Travis Desell, Kristopher Dawsey, Warren Hayashi, Jonathan Purnell, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos A. Varela, Benjamin Willett, and James Wisniewski. Maximum Likelihood Fitting of Tidal Streams with Application to the Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Tails. Astrophysical Journal, volume 683, pages 750-766, 2008.
  4. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Applications for Scalable High Performance Computing. Cluster Computing, pages 323-337, June 2007.
  5. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. The Internet Operating System: Middleware for Adaptive Distributed Computing. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), Special Issue on Scheduling Techniques for Large-Scale Distributed Platforms, volume 20, issue 4, pages 467-480, 2006.

Conference Articles

  1. Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Lee Newberg, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. A Robust Asynchronous Newton Method for Massive Scale Computing Systems. In the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering (CiSE 2011). Wuhan, China, December 9-11, 2011.
  2. Travis Desell, Lee A. Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw K. Szymanski and William Thompson. Finding Protein Binding Sites Using Volunteer Computing Grids. In the 2011 2nd International Congress on Computer Applications and Computational Science (CACS 2011). Bali, Indonesia, November 15-17, 2011. To appear.
  3. Travis Desell, Benjamin A. Willet, Matthew Arsenault, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela. Evolving N-Body Simulations to Determine the Origin and Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy's Halo using Volunteer Computing. In the Proceedings of the IPDPS'11 Fifth Workshop on Desktop Grids and Volunteer Computing Systems (PCGrid 2011). To appear.
  4. Travis Desell, David P. Anderson, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela. An Analysis of Massively Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms. In the Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2010), Barcelona, Spain, pages 1-8, July 2010.
  5. Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos A. Varela, Heidi Newberg and David P. Anderson. Validating Evolutionary Algorithms on Volunteer Computing Grids. In the Proceedings of the 10th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2010), Amsterdam, Netherlands, pages 29-41, June 2010.
  6. Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Heidi Newberg and Nathan Cole. Robust Asynchronous Optimization for Volunteer Computing Grids. In the Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science (eScience2009), Oxford, UK, pages 263-270, December 2009.
  7. Nathan Colen, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Travis Desell, Kristopher Dawsey, Warren Hayashi, Xinyang Fred Liu, Jonathan Purnell, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Benjamin Willett and James Wisniewski. A Study of the Sagittarius Tidal Stream Using Maximum Likelihood. In the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, November 2009.
  8. Travis Desell, Anthony Waters, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Matthew Newby, Heidi Newberg, Andreas Przystawik and Dave Anderson. Accelerating the MilkyWay@Home volunteer computing project with GPUs. In the 8th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2009), Wroclaw, Poland, September 2009.
  9. Nathan Cole, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Travis Desell, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela. Tracing the Sagittarius Tidal Stream with Maximum Likelihood. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Classification and Discovery in Large Astronomical Surveys, Ringberg Castle, Germany, pages 216-220, October 2008.
  10. Travis Desell, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. An Asynchronous Hybrid Genetic-Simplex Search for Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy using Volunteer Computing. In the Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008), Atlanta, Georgia, pages 921-928, July 2008.
  11. Travis Desell, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Asynchronous Genetic Search for Scientific Modeling on Large-Scale Heterogeneous Environments. In the Proceedings of the 17th International Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (HCW/IPDPS'08), Miami, FL, pages 12pp, April 2008. IEEE.
  12. Boleslaw Szymanski, Travis Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. The Effect of Heterogeneity on Asynchronous Panmictic Genetic Search. In the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM'2007), LNCS, Gdansk, Poland, September 2007.
  13. Travis Desell, Nathan Cole, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Distributed and Generic Maximum Likelihood Evaluation. In the Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (eScience2007), Bangalore, India, pages 337-344, December 2007. Best paper finalist
  14. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Dynamic Malleability in Iterative MPI Applications. In the Proceedings of 7th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2007), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pages 591-598, May 2007. IEEE Computer Society. Best paper award nominee
  15. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Components for Scalable High Performance Computing. In the Proceedings of the HPDC'15 Workshop on HPC Grid programming Environments and Components (HPC-GECO/CompFrame), Paris, France, pages 37-44, June 2006. IEEE Computer Society. Best paper award
  16. Travis Desell, Harihar N. Iyer, Abe Stephens, and Carlos A. Varela. OverView: A Framework for Generic Online Visualization of Distributed Systems. In the Proceedings of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2004), eclipse Technology eXchange (eTX) Workshop, Barcelona, Spain, March 2004.
  17. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Load Balancing of Autonomous Actors over Dynamic Networks. In the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS-37 Software Technology Track, pages 1-10, January 2004.

Internal Reports

  1. Carlos A. Varela, Gul Agha, Wei-Jen Wang, Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Jason LaPorte, and Abe Stephens. The SALSA Programming Language: 1.1.2 Release Tutorial. Technical report 07-12, Department of Computer Science, R.P.I., February 2007.
  2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis J. Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. Network Sensitive Reconfiguration of Distributed Applications. Technical report 05-03, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Department of Computer Science, 2005.
  3. Harihar N. Iyer, Abe Stephens, Travis Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. OverView - Dynamic Visualization of Java-Based Highly Reconfigurable Distributed Systems. Technical report, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Worldwide Computing Laboratory, August 2003.

Bibtex for all publications can be found at the Worldwide Computing Laboratory's publications page.

Public Talks

  1. Wildlife@Home [ppt] [keynote]. Public Talk. Fire Hall Theatre, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. April 11th, 2012.
  2. Asynchronous Methods for Scalable and Robust Numerical Optimization [ppt] [keynote]. Public Talk. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, New York, USA. April 5th, 2012.
  3. From Analyzing the Tuberculosis Genome to Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy: Using Volunteer Computing for Computational Science [ppt] [keynote]. Public Talk. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. November 2010.
  4. MilkyWay@Home and Volunteer Computing at RPI [ppt] [keynote]. RPI Center for Open Source Software (RCOSS). RPI, Troy, New York, USA. April 2010.
  5. Asynchronous Global Optimization for Massive-Scale Computing [ppt] [keynote]. PhD Defense. RPI, Troy, New York, USA. November 2009.
  6. Robust Asynchronous Optimization using Volunteer Computing Grids [ppt] [keynote]. 5th Annual Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop. Barcelona, Spain. October 2009.
  7. An Asynchronous Hybrid Genetic-Simplex Search for Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy Using Volunteer Computing. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, July 2008.
  8. Scientific Discovery Through Computationally Intensive Maximum Likelihood Evaluation. NSF Symposium on Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (NSF-CDI 2007). Troy, New York, USA, September 2007.
  9. Malleable Components for Scalable High Performance Computing. Workshop on HPC Grid Programming Environments and Components (HPC-GECO/CompFrame). Paris, France, June 2006.
  10. OverView: A Framework for Generic Online Visualization of Distributed Systems. European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2004), eclipse Technology eXchange (eTX) workshop. Barcelona, Spain, March 2004.

Professional Documents