About

Godmar Back is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah, obtained in 2002. His research interests focus on systems and languages, contributing to the advancement of computer science through his academic and research activities. He is based at the Gilbert Place location in Blacksburg, VA, and is involved in teaching and research within the College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering management
• Engineering
• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Software engineering
• World Wide Web
• Knowledge management
• Mathematics education

Selected publications

• Integrating DevOps to Enhance Student Experience in an Undergraduate Research Project

  2024 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Software engineering

  She is focused on instructing and designing curriculum

  PublisherDOI

• A Detailed Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Influence of Hardware Artifacts on SPEC Integer Benchmark Performance

  IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2024-02-14 · 5 citations

  article

  The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU benchmark has been widely used as a measure of computing performance for decades. The SPEC is an industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite and the collective data provide a proxy for the history of worldwide CPU and system performance. Past efforts have not provided or enabled answers to questions such as, how has the SPEC benchmark suite evolved empirically over time and what micro-architecture artifacts have had the most influence on performance?—have any micro-benchmarks within the suite had undue influence on the results and comparisons among the codes?—can the answers to these questions provide insights to the future of computer system performance? To answer these questions, we detail our historical and statistical analysis of specific hardware artifacts (clock frequencies, core counts, etc.) on the performance of the SPEC benchmarks since 1995. We discuss in detail several methods to normalize across benchmark evolutions. We perform both isolated and collective sensitivity analyses for various hardware artifacts and we identify one benchmark (libquantum) that had somewhat undue influence on performance outcomes. We also present the use of SPEC data to predict future performance.

  PublisherDOI

• A Detailed Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Influence of Hardware Artifacts on SPEC Integer Benchmark Performance

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-01-30

  preprintOpen access

  The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU benchmark has been widely used as a measure of computing performance for decades. The SPEC is an industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite and the collective data provide a proxy for the history of worldwide CPU and system performance. Past efforts have not provided or enabled answers to questions such as, how has the SPEC benchmark suite evolved empirically over time and what micro-architecture artifacts have had the most influence on performance? -- have any micro-benchmarks within the suite had undue influence on the results and comparisons among the codes? -- can the answers to these questions provide insights to the future of computer system performance? To answer these questions, we detail our historical and statistical analysis of specific hardware artifacts (clock frequencies, core counts, etc.) on the performance of the SPEC benchmarks since 1995. We discuss in detail several methods to normalize across benchmark evolutions. We perform both isolated and collective sensitivity analyses for various hardware artifacts and we identify one benchmark (libquantum) that had somewhat undue influence on performance outcomes. We also present the use of SPEC data to predict future performance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using High Impact Practices to Broaden Undergraduate Participation in Computer Systems Research

  2024 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering management

  She is focused on instructing and designing curriculum for CS2104 Problem Solving

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lightning Talks of EduHPC 2020

  2020-11-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Lightning talks of EduHPC are a venue where HPC educators discuss work in progress. This paper summarizes the EduHPC 2020 lightning talks, which cover four very different areas: (i) The simulation-based pedagogy of the EduWRENCH project, including motivations for using simulation to teach High Performance Computing, the design principles underlying EduWRENCH modules, a survey of the available modules, a look at a particular module, plus a conclusion including lesson learned thus far and future plans. (ii) The use of the software-tuning component from Student Cluster Competitions in the HPC master's program at the University of Liverpool. (iii) Steps being taken by the Computer Systems Genome Project at Virginia Tech to foster a community atmosphere among the diverse students working to catalog the lineage of computer system performance over time. (iv) A 3-semester master's degree program titled Computational Engineering, focused on HPC training, being offered at the University of Warsaw.

  PublisherDOI

• Integration and Evaluation of Spiral Theory based Cybersecurity Modules into core Computer Science and Engineering Courses

  2020 · 17 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering management

  Cybersecurity education has been emphasized by several national organizations in the United States, including the National Academy of Engineering, which recognizes securing cyberspace as one of the 14 Engineering Grand Challenges. To prepare students for such challenges and to enhance cybersecurity education opportunities at our large research university, we implemented an NSF-funded cybersecurity education project. This project is a collaborative effort between faculty and graduate students in the Engineering Education, Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CPE) departments at a major US research university. In this effort, we integrated cybersecurity learning modules into multiple existing core CS and CPE courses following Jerome Bruner's spiral-theory model, which has previously been used to reformulate several academic curricula. In this paper, we present our cybersecurity curriculum initiative, describe the spiral-theory based process we developed to implement the curriculum and provide an in-depth description of four reusable cybersecurity learning modules that we developed. A core tenet of spiral theory holds to revisit topics as students advance through their curriculum. This work applies this approach to Cybersecurity education by carefully designing the learning objectives of the modules and its contents. For evaluating these learning modules we implemented pre and post-tests to assess students' technical knowledge, their perceptions towards the modules' learning objectives, and how it influenced their motivation to learn cybersecurity. Our findings are overwhelmingly positive and the students' feedback has helped us improve these learning modules. Since its inception, our initiative has educated more than $2\,000$ students and is currently being used to revise the affected courses' syllabi.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Novel meshes for multivariate interpolation and approximation

  2018-03-29 · 7 citations

  article

  A rapid increase in the quantity of data available is allowing all fields of science to generate more accurate models of multivariate phenomena. Regression and interpolation become challenging when the dimension of data is large, especially while maintaining tractable computational complexity. This paper proposes three novel techniques for multivariate interpolation and regression that each have polynomial complexity with respect to number of instances (points) and number of attributes (dimension). Initial results suggest that these techniques are capable of effectively modeling multivariate phenomena while maintaining flexibility in different application domains.

  PublisherDOI

• Predicting system performance by interpolation using a high-dimensional delaunay triangulation

  High Performance Computing Symposium · 2018-04-15 · 3 citations

  article

  When interpolating computing system performance data, there are many input parameters that must be considered. Therefore, the chosen multivariate interpolation model must be capable of scaling to many dimensions. The Delaunay triangulation is a foundational technique, commonly used to perform piecewise linear interpolation in computer graphics, physics, civil engineering, and geography applications. It has been shown to produce a simplex based mesh with numerous favourable properties for interpolation. While computation of the two- and three-dimensional Delaunay triangulation is a well-studied problem, there are numerous technical limitations to the computability of a high-dimensional Delaunay triangulation. This paper proposes a new algorithm for computing interpolated values from the Delaunay triangulation without computing the complete triangulation. The proposed algorithm is shown to scale to over 50 dimensions. Data is presented demonstrating interpolation using the Delaunay triangulation in a real world high performance computing system problem.

  PublisherDOI

• Development and Analysis of a Spiral Theory-based Cybersecurity Curriculum

  2018-02-21

  article

  The current emphasis on cybersecurity worldwide, demonstrates the importance of this topic. This poster describes a unique NSF funded project that aims to create cybersecurity education opportunities at Virginia Tech (VT). It is a collaborative effort among faculty and graduate students in the Engineering Education, Computer Science (CS), Electrical and Computer Engineering (includes two majors, Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CPE)) Departments, and the Hume Center in the College of Engineering at VT. The goal is to integrate cybersecurity modules into eight required CS and CPE courses, from freshman to junior levels, utilizing Jeremy Bruner's spiral-theory-based1,2 curriculum model. A spiraling theme of "handling threats to software for securing information" is chosen that will be returned to repeatedly as learners advance in their knowledge and intellectual capacity. Cybersecurity goals of the Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Authenticity, Anonymity, Assurance (CIA/AAA) triad, as appropriate for various academic levels, are adopted to develop the cybersecurity modules. Each module engages students in an authentic activity that reinforces the cybersecurity concepts. The project includes an engineering education research component, which is focused on evaluating the effectiveness of the curriculum in enhancing students' knowledge, skills, and motivation in cybersecurity concepts. The first year of the project has been completed by introducing cybersecurity modules into four courses (CS: Introduction to Software Design, and Software Design and Data Structures, and CPE: Engineering Problem Solving with C++, and Data Structures and Algorithms) impacting ~1600 students. The details of curriculum development, implementation and, preliminary findings of the research will be presented.

  PublisherDOI

• Teaching Variability in a Core Systems Course

  2018-02-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Computer systems form the backbone of computing from very small, mobile devices to the huge datacenters that power the digital economy. These systems often exhibit large degrees of variability in their performance that is little understood, but such variability threatens to severely diminish the effectiveness of critical systems upon which society relies. Funded by a large NSF grant, the VarSys project at Virginia Tech researches the sources of variability in computer systems and develops methods to overcome it. We believe it is crucial to raise awareness of the phenomena surrounding variability in computer systems at the undergraduate level. Towards this end, we are connecting the research techniques developed as part of this NSF award to ongoing classroom projects in a core systems course. Our key insight is to expose students to the phenomenon as it occurs in the systems software modules (e.g. a memory allocator, a fork-join thread pool) they are themselves developing in the course. We have implemented a web-based system that allows students to submit their own systems-level code to a specialized cluster which then benchmarks it while systematically varying a number of ordinal and categorical variables. These variables reflect environmental factors that can influence the performance of complex systems. Students are then presented with a visual statistical analysis of the results and asked to interpret those results. We have successfully deployed this system in 2 semesters to over 250 students and collected student data about their experience with this system and are documenting our progress towards these important learning objectives.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• EDU: Development and Analysis of a Spiral Theory-based Cybersecurity Curriculum

  NSF · $300k · 2016–2020

• CAREER: CCF-SHF Advanced Execution Environments for Next-generation Cloud Applications

  NSF · $428k · 2009–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Kirk W. Cameron

  Virginia Tech

  13 shared

• Ali R. Butt

  Virginia Tech

  9 shared

• Jay Lepreau

  University of Utah

  8 shared

• Calvin J. Ribbens

  Virginia Tech

  8 shared

• Yili Hong

  8 shared

• Wilson C. Hsieh

  7 shared

• Thomas Lux

  7 shared

• Li Xu

  Harvard University

  6 shared