He joined the Department of Computer Science at UCSB in 1993 as an Assistant Professor, where he is currently a member of the Parallel Systems Group. His main research interests are algorithms and software tools for parallel and distributed processing, scheduling and runtime systems, and parallel applications in scientific computing and digital libraries. He is leading a project called RAPID to develop scheduling algorithms and runtime system support for parallelizing irregular codes on distributed memory machines and workstation clusters. With the help of RAPID, his group has developed a novel solution for parallel sparse Gaussian Elimination that has achieved the highest performance record in the literature for this problem. Tao is still connected to Rutgers as a colaborator and Co-PI with Professor Gerasoulis on several projects supported by DARPA and NSF. As a part of the UCSB Alexandria digital library effort, he is leading another project called SWEB to conduct research on multiprocessor WWW servers and adaptive client- server computing and apply partitioning and scheduling techniques in these applications.
Tao Yang received the Research Initiation Award from NSF in 1994, UC Regents' Junior Faculty Award in 1994, an Outstanding Faculty Teacher Award in 1995 from UCSB College of Engineering, and the CAREER Award from NSF in 1997. He is on program and/or organizing committees for a number of parallel computing conferences/workshops. The most recent ones are IPPS'98, ICPP'98, HiPC'98, Irregular'98, and IPPS'97. He is on the editorial boards for two electronic journals and is a guest editor for a special issue in Parallel Processing Letters.