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Recommendation for Han-Ku Lee from Geoffrey Fox
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Nearly all NPAC students are given a trial before we accepted them as part of
our team. Han-Ku Lee started in 1998, when he joined Dr Bryan Carpenter's
research group as an independent study student. As he did well here, he was
taken on as a graduate research assistant In January 1999 when he was also
admitted as a Syracuse PhD student.

Bryan Carpenter is moving to FSU with me and for several years we have been
working on issues connected with "Java for Scientific Computing" or "High
Performance and Java". We have in particular looked at both message passing
and data parallel implications of these ideas. Lee has been involved in the
latter of these while Lim (the other student from this effort applying to FSU)
has been involved in message passing issues.

Lee has been closely involved with implementation of the "HPJava" translator.
This is part of the "HPspmd" project---funded by NSF under the title "Data
Parallel SPMD Programming Models from Fortran to Java". In the spirit of the
Java Grande movement, which promotes Java as a language for large scale
techinical computing, HPJava is a dialect of Java extended with features to
support distributed, data-parallel programming. Chuck Koelbel from NSF gave
our project a very favorable review after its first year.

Lee's work in this project was initially supervised by Dr Guansong Zhang who
has also written a letter for him. Under Dr Zhang's tutelage, Han-Ku learned
about development of compiler front-ends using parser-generator tools, and
developed tree-builders and unparsers that are now incorporated in the
translator.  Subsequently Lee worked directly with Dr Carpenter and Qiang
Zheng to complete the initial version of the HPJava translator.  Over the last
year Lee has taken on an increasingly central role in development of the
translator.  He developed the current type-checking module, and has been
gradually taking over the development of the translation modules themselves.
He has also been developing the test suite, and running the early tests on the
system. Lee is now the principle developer of the HPJava translator, which is
the central software component of the HPspmd project, critical to the success
of the project as a whole.
The ongoing work was publicized most recently in a poster presentation
at Supercomputing '99, on which Lee was listed as a co-author.

Lee is thus a talented experienced student who I strongly recommend for
admission to FSU.

Geoffrey Fox
Professor of Computer Science Florida State University