Winter Seminar, Barney Maccabe, February 18, 2004 Dr. Barney Maccabe, associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico, presented his lecture “Splintering Contexts for Execution”. He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Arizona and his graduate degrees in Information and Computer Sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition to his faculty position in CS, professor Maccabe is also the Associate Director of the UNM Center for High Performance Computing. Professor Maccabe's research interests are focused on systems software for high performance computing systems. Abstract: Modern computing systems offer a variety of contexts for execution of code. In splintering, functionality that is traditionally centralized and executed in a single context is broken into small pieces, called splinters, which are then distributed among the execution contexts in the system. The goal is to identify a splintering of the functionality so that splinters can be distributed in a way that improves overall system performance while retaining the integrity of the original implementation. To date, we have focused our efforts on splintering related to communication protocols across the execution contexts provided by a host processor and programmable network interface card in a computational cluster. In this context, splintering is related to OS-bypass and protocol offloading. In the talk I will describe how splintering differs from these approaches.