The National Science Foundation Division of Computing and Communication Foundations awarded The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York a $600,000 Project Grant under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering federal grant program (CFDA 47.070).
The grant will support research to develop new algorithms and frameworks for massively parallel computation on modern computing systems. Specifically, the researchers will design efficient algorithms for core computations in the practical massively parallel computation model. They will seek to reduce the number of computation rounds and optimize tradeoffs between rounds, memory usage, machine count, and communication time. The researchers will also develop dynamic algorithms for updating computation outputs efficiently in response to frequent input changes. It is expected that discoveries from this research will be integrated into courses and literature on parallel, distributed, and big data algorithms. The grant aims to advance foundational research with potential applications in areas like social networks, web search, and transportation.