Research Areas:

  • High-Performance Computing
  • Cyber Security
  • Computational Earth
  • Computer Science Education

Grants:

External Grants – PI/Co-PI

Dr. Ghafoor has been involved in 15 externally funded research projects where he was either PI(10) or Co-PI(5). The funded projects have totaled almost $4.5 M. He has also been involved as PI or Co-PI in 5 grant proposals which have not been funded.

  1. Semi-Automatic Assessment of Parallel Programs in Training of Students and Faculty. Grant Period September 1, 2019 – August 31, 2021. Funding Agency: National Science Foundation. Grant Amount $82,000.
  2. Development and Improvement of High-Resolution Floos-2D GPU Modeling Titan HPC Environment. Grant Period: August1 2018 – July 31 2019. Funding Agency: Oak Ridge National Lab, Grant Amount: $ 296,192, Co-PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Alfred Kalyanapu).
  3. Tracking Water Storage in Lakes: Citizen and Satellites. Grant Period: January 2017 – February 2018. Funding Agency: NASA Grant Amount: Prototype Phase: $152,674 February 1, 2017, -January 31-2018, Implementation Phase: $1,492,802 TTU-PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, Lead PI: Tamlin Pavelsky, UNC. (Prototype phase has been funded, implementation phase may be funded based on performance of the prototype phase).
  4. Detection and Analysis of Malware in Critical Infrastructure. Grant Period October 1, 2018- September 30, 2020, Funding Agency: ORNL, Grant Amount $336,000, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, Co-PI Mike Rogers.
  5. Black Box: Highly Secure Environment for Health Data Computation. Grant Period: August 1, 2018 – September 30, 2021, Funding Agency: Oak Ridge National Lab, Grant Amount: $112,508, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, Co-PI Mike Rogers.
  6. iPDC – Summer Institute for Integrating Parallel and Distributed Computing in Introductory Programming Classes. Grant Period: September 1 2017 – August 31, 2020, Funding Agency: National Science Foundation, Grant Amount: $499,988, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, Co-PIs Mike Rogers, David Brown.
  7. Benchmark and analyze open source parallel XXT libraries on different HPC architectures for performance prediction. Grant Period November 11, 2016 – September 30, 2017. Funding Agency: Oak Ridge National Lab. Grant Amount $25,000, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor.
  8. Develop and Benchmark Architecture Agnostic Scalable Library of Data Parallel Kernels for Big Data Architecture. Grant Period April 1, 2016- September 30, 2016. Funding Agency: Oakridge National Lab. Grant Amount $25,000, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor.
  9.  Development of Integrated DHSVM-Flood2D-GPU modeling framework for regional-scale modeling for high-resolution rapid flood risk assessment. Grant Period March 1, 2016 – September 30, 2016. Funding Agency: Oak Ridge National Lab. Grant Amount $60,000, Co- PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Alfred Kalyanapu.
  10. iPDC: Integrating Parallel and Distributed Computing in Introductory Programming. Grant Period: August 2015 – July 2016. Funding Agency: National Science Foundation, Grant Amount: $49,973, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, Co-PI: Mike Rogers.
  11. Knowledge‐based Flood Inundation Forecast on Affordable Mobile Platforms to Empower Farmers, Grant Period: October 2015 – September 2017. Funding Agency: University of Washington. Grant Amount $35,000, TTU-PI: Sheikh Ghafoor. Dr. Faisal Hossain is lead PI of this project Funding Agency: Development Innovation Ventures Annual Program of USAID (USAID/DIV) (Total Grant Amount $150,000).
  12. Integrating Hands on Security Exercises in Computer Networks Class: Grant Period Jan 2015 –Dec 2015. Funding Agency: Intel-NSF-GTISC Security Education Micro-grant Program, Grant Amount $5,000, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor.
  13. CyberWorkshops: Resources and Strategies for Teaching Cybersecurity in Computer Science (CReST). Grant Period: September 2014 – August 2017. Funding Agency: National Science Foundation, Grant Amount: $550,000, Co- PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Ambareen Siraj.
  14. Department wide Parallel and Distributed Computing Adpotion. Funding Agency: National Science Foundation/TCPP Early Adopter grant, Grant Amount: $5,500, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor.
  15. SecKnitKit (Security Knitting Kit): Integrating Security into Traditional Computer Science Courses. Grant Period: September 2012 – August 2014. Funding Agency: National Science Foundation, Grant Amount: $200,000, Co- PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Ambareen Siraj.
  16. Enhancing the programming experience for engineering students through hands-on integrated computer experiences. Grant Period: September 2010 – August 2014. Funding Agency: National Science Foundation, Grant Amount: $600,000, Co- PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Stephan Canfield.

External Grants – Senior Personnel

  1. Autonomic Dynamic Resource-­Aware Runtime System.  Grant Period: January 2011 – September 2011. Funding Agency: Sandia National Laboratory, Grant amount: $75,000, Senior Personnel: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Stephen Scott.

Internal Grants

  1. Rapid flood modeling and consequence assessment using heterogeneous accelerator based high performance computation. Funding Agency: Office of Research TTU, Grant Amount: $10,000, PI: Alfred Kalayanpu, Sheikh Ghafoor.
  2. Prototyping a Smart-Phone Application for Class-room and Field Demonstration on Delivery of Water Knowledge from Environmental Satellites around the World. Funding Agency: College of Engineering, TTU, Grant Amount: $10,000, CO-PI: Sheikh Ghafoor, PI: Faisal Hossain .
  3. Modeling and Simulation of an Adaptive Parallel System. Grant Period: July 2009-June 2010, Funding Agency: Office of Research, TTU, Grant Amount: $4000, PI: Sheikh Ghafoor.

Publications:

2018:

  1. Ryan Marshall, Sheikh K. Ghafoor, and Md. Bulbul Sharif, “A System for Performance Porting of Iterative Structured Grid Applications in HPC Environments”, in Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT), Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 21-23, 2018
  2. Md Mosharaf Hossain, Thomas Hines, Sheikh K.  Ghafoor, Ryan Marshall, Muzakihir  Amanzholov, S. R Kannan, “Performance Issues of SYRK implementations in Shared Memory Environments for Edge Cases”, in Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT), Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 21-23, 2018.
  3. Islam, S. R., Ghafoor, S. K., & Eberle, W. (2018, December). “Mining Illegal Insider Trading of Stocks: A Proactive Approach”, in  Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data), Seattle, WA, December 10-13 (pp. 1397-1406).
  4. Hossain, M. M., Hines, T. M., Ghafoor, S. K., Islam, S. R., Kannan, R., & Sukumar, S. R. (2018, December). “A Flexible-blocking Based Approach for Performance Tuning of Matrix Multiplication Routines for Large Matrices with Edge Cases”, in  Proceedings of the BPOD Workshop, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data), Seattle, WA, December 10-13, (pp. 3853-3862).
  5. David W. Brown, Sheikh K. Ghafoor, and Stephen Canfield, “Instruction of Introductory Programming Course Using Multiple Contexts” in  Proceedings of  the 23rd Annual ACM SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. Larnaca, Cyprus, July 1 – July 4, 2018.
  6. Ryan Marshall, Sheikh Ghafoor, Mike Rogers, Alfred Kalyanapu and Tigstu Dullo, “Performance Enhancement of a Flood Simulator for Heterogeneous HPC Environments”, Submitted to Special Issue of International Journal of Network and Communication, Volume 8 Issue 2 Pages 387-407, 2018, https://doi.org/10.15803/ijnc.8.2_387.
  7. Md Mosharaf Hossain, Douglas A. Talbert, Sheikh K. Ghafoor, Ramakrishnan Kannan, “FAWCA: A Flexible-greedy Approach to find Well-tuned CNN Architecture for Image Recognition Problem”, in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science (ICDATA’18), Las Vegas, Nevada, July 30 – August 2,2018
  8. Sheikh Rabiul Islam, William Eberle, Sheikh Khaled Ghafoor, “Credit Default Mining Using Combined Machine Learning and Heuristic Approach”, in Proceedings of the14th International Conference on Data Science (ICDATA’18), Las Vegas, Nevada, July 30 – August 2, 2018.
  9. Ryan Marshall, Sheikh Ghafoor, and Michael Rogers, “A Software Abstraction Method for Efficient 2D Grid Computations in Heterogeneous HPC Environments”, in Proceedings of the PMAW: The Programming Models and Algorithms Workshop, IPDPS 2018, Vancouver, Canada, May 21-25, 2018.

2017:

  1. Ryan Marshall, Sheikh K. Ghafoor, Alfred J. Kalyanapu, Mike Rogers, and Tigstu T. Dullo, “Performance Improvement of a Two-dimensional Flood Simulation Application in Hybrid Computing Environments” in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR 17), to be held in Aomori, Japan, November 19-22, 2017.
  2. Sheikh Ghafoor, David W. Brown, and Mike Rogers “Integrating Parallel Computing in Introductory Programming Classes: An Experience and Lesson Learned”, in the Proceedings of the Euro-EDUPAR 2017 workshop of 23rd International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, August 28-September 1, 2017.
  3. Islam, Sheikh Rabiul, William Eberle, and Sheikh Khaled Ghafoor. “Mining Bad Credit Card Accounts from OLAP and OLTP.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Compute and Data Analysis, pp. 129-137. ACM, 2017.