Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security at Northwestern University
Welcome to the website for the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security at Northwestern University. The Center participants include faculty and researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, the Feinberg School of Medicine, and the Kellogg School of Management. CUCIS also has participants from various national labs such as Argonne National Labatory (ANL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and includes support from companies such as IBM, Intel, and Sun.





Northwestern University - EECS Dept.

Today's "connect anytime and anywhere" society based on the use of digital technologies is fueling tremendous data growth and transforming the way our business, science, and digital technology-based world functions. Data in the terabytes range are not uncommon today and are expected to reach petabytes for many application domains in science, engineering, business, bioinformatics, and medicine in the near future. Ultra-scale refers to the two to three orders of magnitude increase in data sizes, computing power, and complexity of data compared to what is considered today. As data becomes so pervasive, assurance, trust and security of information becomes of paramount importance. Secure computing, therefore, must be considered as an important parameter in any research dealing with ultra-scale computing.

The goal of the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security (CUCIS) is to conduct highly innovative research in many synergistic areas of ultra-scale computing and information technologies. Furthermore, the goal of the center is to foster and enable inter-disciplinary research in computing technologies that scale to these levels. The CUCIS is directed by Prof. Alok Choudhary, and is presently supported by the NSF, DOE, Sandia National Labs, NASA, and Intel. To learn more, please use the navigation bar at the top of the page, or go directly to descriptions of our various research projects, a complete list of our publications, or more information about the group members.

Our centers benchmark suite, NU-MineBench, which contains high performance and parallel data mining applications is available for download.

  • 01/2012 - Congratulations to Arifa Nisar, Wei-Keng Liao and Alok Choudhary "Delegation-Based I/O Mechanism for High Performance Computing Systems" is published in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed systems, Vol. 23, No. 2, February 2012 (pdf).

  • 01/2012 - Congratulations to Daniel Honbo, Amit Pande, Ankit Agrawal, and Alok Choudhary "Hardware Architecture for Pairwise Statistical Significance Estimation in Bioinformatics Problems" won the Design Contest at the International Conference on Very Large-Scale Integration design (VLSI 2012) , Hyderabad, India. , (Conference Schedule), (presentation).


  • 12/2011 - Congratulations to Dr. Choudhary on being named Keynote speaker at the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2011) , Bangalore, India. He will present "Discovering Knowledge from Massive Social Networks and Science Data - Next Frontier for HPC", (Keynote abstract)
  • 12/2011 - Congratulations to CUCIS team members for 6 accepted papers @ ICDM '11, as follows:
    - William Hendrix, Isaac Tetteh, Ankit Agrawal, Fredrick Semazzi, Wei-keng Liao, and Alok Choudhary,
    Community Dynamics and Analysis of Decadal Trends in Climate Data, ICDM Climate. (presentation) (pdf).
    - Ankit Agrawal and Alok Choudhary,
    Identifying HotSpots in Lung Cancer Data Using Association Rule Mining, ICDM BioDM. (presentation) (pdf).
    - Yu Cheng, Kunpeng Zhang, Yusheng Xie, Ankit Agrawal, Wei-keng Liao, and Alok Choudhary,
    Learning to Group Web Text Incorporating Prior Information, OEDM (presentation) (pdf).
    - Lalith Polepeddi, Ankit Agrawal, and Alok Choudhary,
    Poll: A Citation-Text-Based System for Identifying High-Impact Contributions of an Article, ICDM DaMNet (pdf).
    - Kunpeng Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yusheng Xie, Ankit Agrawal, Diana Palsetia, Kathy Lee, and Alok Choudhary,
    SES: Sentiment Elicitation System for Social Media Data, ICDM-SENTIRE. (presentation) (pdf).
    - Kathy Lee, Diana Palsetia, Mostofa Patwary, Ankit Agrawal, Alok Choudhary, and Ramanathan Narayanan,
    Twitter Trending Topic Classification, OEDM (presentation) (pdf).
  • 08/2011 - Understanding Climate Change Workshop, University of Minnesota - Dr. Alok Choudhary presented "Developing Scalable and Power-Efficient Data Mining Kernels" .
  • 08/2011 - ICEC, Liverpool, England - Kunpeng Zhang presented "Mining Millions of Reviews: A Technique to Rank Products Based on Importance of Reviews" (pdf), (presentation).
    This paper was awarded Honourable Mention at the conference.
  • 07/2011 - CScADS Data workshop, Tahoe, CA - Saba Sehrish presented "Damsel: A Data Model Storage Library for Exascale Science" (presentation).
  • 07/2011 - Data Intensive Computing, Staten Island, New York - Dr. Alok Choudhary presented "Discovering Knowledge from Massive Social and Science Network and Unstructured Data".
  • 06/2011 - Graduates: Abhishek Das, PhD "Microarchitectural Approaches for Optimizing Power and Profitability in Multi-core Processors" Advisors: Alok Choudhary and Gokhan Memik.
    Ramanathan Narayanan, PhD "Mining Text for Relationship Extraction and Sentiment Analysis" Adviser: Alok Choudhary.


  • 06/2011 - Yves Xie receives Outstanding Senior Award in Computer Engineering
  • 05/2011 - Expeditions Meetings at University of Minnesota
  • 04/2011 - IPDPS Anchorage Alaska - William Hendrix presented "Sensitive and Specific Identification of Protein Complexes in 'Perturbed' Protein Interaction Networks from Noisy Pull-Down Data"


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© 2011 Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University
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Last Updated: 2012 Heeter