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Frank Mueller

FM
A headshot of Frank Mueller standing in front of a red background.

Computer Science

Professor

Computer Science

Engineering Building II (EB2) 3266

919.515.7889

Bio

Frank Mueller is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. Mueller has made significant contributions to system-level software, including fault-tolerant computing, compiler optimization and scalable performance analysis. He has developed novel techniques for real-time scheduling, memory analysis and resilience in large-scale computing systems. His work has been recognized with multiple best paper awards and research honors.

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science Florida State University 1994

M.S. Computer Science Florida State University 1991

B.S. Computer Science Technical University Berlin 1987

Area(s) of Expertise

Mueller's research focuses on high-performance computing, embedded and real-time systems, operating systems, quantum computing and parallel and distributed systems.

Publications

View all publications

Grants

Date: 09/01/21 - 8/31/27
Amount: $1,125,000.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

The Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation will focus on using quantum simulation to gain insight into������������������and thereby exploit������������������the rich behavior of complex quantum systems. Combining expertise from researchers in computer science, engineering, and physics, our team will address the challenge of robustly simulating classically intractable quantum systems of practical interest, and verifying the correctness of the simulation result.

Date: 12/14/22 - 6/30/25
Amount: $183,361.00
Funding Agencies: US Dept. of Energy (DOE)

This project proposes to explore solutions to both the workflow scheduling problem and the fault awareness requirements. Its primary aim is to prototype a novel software scheduling technology to manage dynamically changing heterogeneous resource pools on one side and a fault propagation mechanism within Flux instances on the other side. This reflects emerging trends in combing HPC and cloud computing while taking full advantage of characteristics for heterogeneous resource requirements of modern applications workflows under challenges to address faults in a transparent manner.

Date: 10/01/22 - 9/30/24
Amount: $62,500.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

This work aims to study sparsity in widely-used tensor networks by introducing constraints, regularization, dictionary, and/or domain knowledge for better data compression, faster computation, lower memory storage, along with better interpretability by: 1) Proposing memory hierarchy and microarchitecture-aware representations and effective yet efficient data (re-)arranging; 2) Designing memory hierarchy-aware and balanced algorithm with smart page arrangement; 3) Erasing the curse of dimensionality through memoization and intelligent data allocation; 4) Exploring specialized architecture on GPU and FPGA. We will accelerate six application scenarios by leveraging the scalable and highly optimized sparse tensor network on distributed heterogeneous systems.

Date: 08/01/21 - 7/31/24
Amount: $623,408.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Quantum computing has the potential to provide a significant advantage over classical computing in terms of algorithmic complexity. The STAQ project is focused on demonstrating such an advantage on an ion trap quantum hardware platform developed at Duke with 64 or more qubits. This requires a co-design between hardware and software to be successful, which Duke University has been developing. NCSU proposes to complement these efforts, potentially leading to earlier demonstration of quantum advantage, by creating a transpiler to translate Qiskit programs to run on STAQ devices, assess benefits of creating complex native gates, and modeling the reliability of STAQ ion trap quantum computers.

Date: 10/01/22 - 6/30/24
Amount: $175,000.00
Funding Agencies: Cisco Systems, Inc.

This work seeks to investigate the potential of non-volatile memories (NVM) with its novel properties of byte addressability, persistency, larger capacity, yet higher latency, and addresses the its applicability within the next generation edge cloud infrastructures. The objective of this work is to assess the efficacy of providing services in the edge cloud as opposed to conventional cloud-hosted infrastructure.

Date: 01/01/23 - 5/15/24
Amount: $50,000.00
Funding Agencies: Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) - NCSU Research Site

Emerging CPS applications increasingly require significant computational power to benefit from machine learning. From lower-end multi-core systems (4-core A72) to embedded GPUs (NVIDIA Drive DGX), highly parallel compute platforms dominate the application space. However, real-time requirements poorly map to such platforms and impose high coding complexity. The objective of this work is to alleviate programmers by extending the OpenMP to real-time tasks and data parallelism. Instead of deploying a real-time operating system with limited compatibility, we propose novel OpenMP extensions, define their semantics and provide an implementation on Linux mapping to privileged priorities under static and dynamic real-time scheduling policies.

Date: 04/13/21 - 9/30/23
Amount: $225,000.00
Funding Agencies: US Dept. of Energy (DOE)

We attack a key software challenge in quantum computing, the programmability of quantum computers. Writing quantum programs is vastly more difficult than writing classical programs, with relatively few of the skills required by the latter translating to the former. Furthermore, the two dominant forms of quantum computation������������������circuit-model quantum computing and quantum annealing������������������are programmed fundamentally differently from each other, and each requires substantial effort to master. The goal of this research is to both unify and facilitate the exploitation of circuit-model quantum computers and quantum annealers. As a result, productivity of computational scientists is increased in all scientific disciplines.

Date: 10/01/18 - 9/30/23
Amount: $500,000.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

CPS and IoT devices are inherently networked, which exposes them to malware attacks. We propose to significantly increase the cyber security specifically of CPS and IoT computing devices by developing real-time monitoring techniques that defeat cyber-attacks.

Date: 08/15/17 - 4/30/23
Amount: $331,601.00
Funding Agencies: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

The goal of this proposal is to optimize and to openly provide to the OA community a new technology to rapidly and automatically measure cartilage thickness, appearance and changes on magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the knee for huge image databases. This will allow assessment of trajectories of cartilage loss over time and associations with clinical outcomes on an unprecedented scale; future work will focus on incorporating additional disease markers, ranging from MRI-derived biomarkers for bone and synovial lesions, to biochemical biomarkers, to genetic information.

Date: 11/09/18 - 9/30/21
Amount: $313,726.00
Funding Agencies: US Dept. of Energy (DOE)

This project proposes to explore different solutions of software support for heterogeneous memory architectures for future supercomputers. Its primary aim will be to seamlessly integrate the new memory technologies in to the existing architecture support while taking full advantage of its characteristics for existing HPC applications and making the programmers job easier for developing new applications for the future systems.


View all grants
  • 2019 | Best Paper Award at the IEEE Cluster Computing Conference
  • 2019 | Gauss Award for “most outstanding research paper submitted to the International Supercomputing Conference”
  • 2018 | Best Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data
  • 2018 | ACM Fellow
  • 2017 | Outstanding Paper Award at the European Conference on Real-Time Systems
  • 2016 | IEEE Fellow
  • 2014 | Humboldt Research Award
  • 2012 | Gold Core Member Award, IEEE- Computer Society
  • 2011 | Distinguished Member Award, Association for Computing Machinery
  • 2010 | NVIDIA Research Award
  • 2009 | Google Research Award
  • 2007 | Humboldt Research Fellowship
  • 2007 | Gelato (IP)2 Award, Innovative Project on Itanium processors
  • 2007 | Best Paper Award, IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium
  • 2006 | IBM Faculty Award
  • 2003 | National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award
  • 2003 | Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium
  • 2002 | Best Paper Award at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium
  • 2002 | Faculty Research and Professional Development Award, NC State University
  • 1999 | Advisor of Best Master's Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin
  • 1989 | Fulbright-Stipend and Stipend by the Federation of German-American Clubs