------------------------------------------------------------------------ Recommendation for Sang Lim from Geoffrey Fox ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sang Lim (like Hanku Lee) went through the usual NPAC evaluation process during 1998. and started working on his PhD in January 1999 -- essentially the start of our NSF proposal to look at HPJava. This proposal linked data parallel and message parallel paradigms and Lim's research has focussed on the latter -- in particular he is working on "mpiJava", a Java binding of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard for parallel computing published in 1993. The mpiJava software has been one of NPAC's important contributions to the proceedings of the Java Grande Forum. It was a principle reference implementation cited by the Java Grande Message Passing working group. Sang Lim developed the software that incorporated object serialization to the mpiJava API. In our view this work addresses some of the most difficult issues in development of high-performance message-passing interfaces for Java for MPI was never designed with objects in mind and this is clear weakness of this important standard. The work was reported in papers presented at the 3rd MPI Developers' and Users' Conference (MPIDC '99), the Workshop on Java for Parallel and Distributed Computing at IPPS/SPDP '99, and the ACM 1999 Java Grande Conference. Lim was a co- author on these papers. Sang Lim is now the principle developer and maintainer of the publically available mpiJava software. http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/pcrc/HPJava/mpiJava.html The software is one of the foundations of an NSF-ITR proposal we submitted recently on behalf of Florida State University ("ITR/ACS: Integration of High Performance Message-based Programming Environments with Distributed Objects and the Web"). Lim is a talented proven research student who I strongly recommend for admission to FSU. Geoffrey Fox Professor of Computer Science Florida State University ------------------------------------------------------------------ Recommendation Letter for Sang Lim from Dr. Bryan Carpenter ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. David Bryan Carpenter Northeast Parallel Architectures Center 111 College Place Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 Phone: (315) 443-5068 FAX : (315) 443-1973 email: dbc@npac.syr.edu Recommendation for Sang Boem Lim Dear Colleague, I have supervised Sang Boem Lim in activities related to our research group since June 1998, when he joined us as an ``independent study'' student. Sang Lim demonstrated great promise, and in January 1999 he became a Ph.D. student, and a Graduate Resarch Assistant in my group. Sang Lim has been essentially involved with the implementation of our mpiJava system---a Java binding of MPI developed as part of the ongoing HPJava project. He was particularly involved in the work to introduce object serialization into the mpiJava API, and developed software that was the main basis for several recent workshop and conference papers, on which he was a co-author (``Automatic Object Serialization in the mpiJava Interface to MPI'' in proceedings of 3rd MPI Developers' and Users' Conference MPI Software Technology Press 1999; ``mpiJava: An Object-oriented Java Interface to MPI'', in proceedings Intl. Workshop on Java for Parallel and Distributed Computing, IPPS/SPDP '99; ``Object Serialization for Marshalling Data in a Java Interface to MPI'', in proceedings ACM 1999 Java Grande Conference, ACM Press 1999). The mpiJava software for which Sang Lim is now primarily responsible for has been available on the Web for over a year. It is regularly downloaded by people wanting to use it for research and teaching (about 30 downloads per month, currently). The software is a cornerstone of an NSF-ITR proposal recently submitted on behalf of FSU (``ITR/ACS:Integration of High Performance Message-based Programming Environments with Distributed Objects and the Web''). It has also served as a reference implementation in a recent Java message-passing standardization effort, attempted by a working group of the Java Grande Forum. Besides his work on the underlying system software, Sang Lim has produced mpiJava demos for various conferences. Currently he is studying the Jini and Javaspaces software from Sun, which we expect will be important to future work on scalable fault-tolerant computing, following on from the mpiJava work. Sang Lim is an exceptional student; he will be a vital resource for continuing work on Java-based parallel computing at FSU. Yours sincerely Bryan Carpenter Research Scientist NPAC Ph.D. Westfield College London 1984 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Letter for Sang Lim from Dr. Yuhong Wen ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To whom it may concern: This is a reference to Mr. Sang Boem Lim. Mr. Sang Boem Lim is a graduate student in the department of computer engineering of Syracuse University. He is also a research assistant in Northeast Parallel Architecture Center, and participates in the research of MPI-Java project, which is to provide Java language interface to Message Passing Interface (MPI). This is a very hot and important research topic aiming to provide the Java language with the ability to support the distributed scientific computing. Mr. Lim's work in our group is to do the development and implementation of a Java binding with MPI and the development of some applications on this system. He also did the implementation of object serialization of large data array in Java, which greatly improve the performance of Java object serialization when dealing with large amount of data arrays. During my work with Mr. Sang Lim, I found that he has very good understanding and knowledge of computer science and technology, and he is more than qualified to be a computer science graduate student. During his work in our group, I also found that Mr. Sang Boem Lim is a very good team worker. He co- operates well with other team members and discusses with them how to make good progress in the project. In my opinion, Mr. Sang Boem Lim is an excellent candidate in the graduate study of computer science. And I believe he can do very good work in the future graduate study and research. If you have any question concern about Mr. Sang Boem Lim's research work in our group, please feel free to contact me at (315) 443-3879. Regards, Yuhong Wen Research Scientist NPAC Ph.D. Tsinghua University Department of Computer science and Technology 1994 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Recommendation for Sang Lim from Nancy McCracken --------------------------------------------------------------------- I have known Sang Lim as a graduate student for two years. He took the graduate class CPS615 with Geoffrey Fox in the fall of 1998, when I was working with the programming/homework side of that course, and he also took CPS616 with me in spring of 1999. In these classes, Sang was an excellent student. For his project in CPS615, he implemented a large project involving parallelizing a real computational fluid dynamics program, incorporating some of the work from his research group in MPI Java in a demonstration of its capabilities. For CPS616, he worked on a project that was distinguished by its integration of distributed web technologies. Sang has demonstrated very strong technical skills and also his ability to integrate systems and ideas. I would recommend him highly to continue working on Ph.D. research. Dr. Nancy McCracken Research Scientist, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center and Affiliated Faculty, Computer Science Department Syracuse University