Networks, Parallel and Distributed Systems

The Networks, Parallel and Distributed Systems (NPDS) research group is a core group within the Faculty of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Adelaide. It concerns with issues on how to deploy multi processor systems and networks for efficient computation and communication which exist in almost every sector of our
modern society.

Computation and communication on multi-processor systems and networks require naturally that enclosed operations are executed in a distributed (parallel) manner rather than sequentially as in conventional human logic. Thus, a great challenge in NPDS that is of ultimate theoretical significance apart from its practical impacts is how to advance our conventional concept of sequential thinking to this new paradigm of problem solving (=computation+communication).

Furthermore, many issues to do with networks, parallel and distributed systems are becoming central to national security, as well as national economies, educational systems and personal interaction.

Strategic Focus

Research activities range from modelling and algorithms to system architectures and software tools for networks and parallel and distributed systems. Members of the group have been actively working on the following five concentrations characterised by the distributed nature of networks and multi-processor systems:

• computation: algorithms, grid computing, e-Research (Coddington, Shen, Wendelborn)
• data: content delivery, knowledge discovery, web service provisioning and composition, peer-to-peer data sharing (Shen, Sheng, Michaelwicz)
• control: interconnection networks, routing, optical networks (Izu, Pope, Roughan, Shen)
• administration: traffic engineering, agent-deployed systems, automated planning, autonomic networks (Roughan, Rumsewicz, Shen)
• security: secure distributed computation (Roughan, Shen)