The December 2005 issue of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center magazine highlights work on checkpoint-restart of long-running scientific programs. Titled "When bad things happen to good programs," the article details work underway by Cornell's Intelligent Software Systems Group, led by Computer Science professor Keshav Pingali.
The goal of the group's research is to build intelligent software systems for automatically enhancing the efficiency and survivability of programs, thereby enabling applications programmers to focus on high-level algorithmic issues. The group works in several areas, ranging from restructuring and optimizing compilers to protocols for fault-tolerant computing systems.
Best known for its contributions to automatic parallelism and locality enhancement of programs, the group has made advances that are used in software products from Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics and Digital Equipment Corporation, among other companies.