2016 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Johann Rudi’s recent research has focused on modeling, analysis and development of algorithms for studying the earth’s mantle convection by means of large-scale simulations on high-performance computers. Mantle convection is the fundamental physical process within the earth’s interior responsible for the thermal and geological evolution of the planet, including plate tectonics.
Rudi, along with colleagues from Switzerland and the United States, presented a paper on mantle convection at SC15, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, that was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. Rudi and his team developed new computational methods that are capable of processing difficult problems based on partial differential equations, such as mantle convection, with optimal algorithmic performance at extreme scales.
Axel Huebl is a computational physicist who specializes in next-generation, laser plasma-based particle accelerators. Huebl and others reinvented the particle-in-cell algorithm to simulate plasma-physics with 3D simulations of unprecedented detail on leadership-scale many-core supercomputers such as Titan (ORNL).
Through this line of research, Huebl also derives models to understand and predict promising regimes for applications such as radiation therapy of cancer with laser-driven ion beams. Interacting closely with experimental scientists, their simulations are showing that plasma-based particle accelerators may yield numerous scientific advances in industrial and medical applications. Huebl was part of a team that were Gordon-Bell prize finalists at SC13.
2015 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Maciej Besta, a PhD student in the Scalable Parallel Computing Lab led by Professor Torsten Hoefler at ETH Zurich, won recognition for his project, “Accelerating Large-Scale Distributed Graph Computations”. During first year as a PhD student, Besta successfully completed several projects related to various HPC subdomains, which secured Besta the first Google European Doctoral Fellowship in Parallel Computing.
Besta’s research interests focus on accelerating large-scale distributed graph processing in both traditional scientific domains and in the emerging big data computations. Besta and his advisor also collaborate with researchers from the Georgia institute of Technology on designing a novel on-chip topology for future massively parallel many core architectures that improves the performance of network traffic patterns present in graph processing workloads.
Dhairya Malhotra, a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin actively working in the field of high performance computing, won recognition for his project, “Scalable Algorithms for Evalu
ating Volume Potentials”. As an undergraduate intern, Malhotra was part of the group that won the 2010 ACM Gordon Bell Prizefor "Petascale Direct Numerical Simulation of Blood Flow on 200K Cores and Heterogeneous Architectures," where he had implemented performance critical GPUcode using CUDA.Malhotra’s research focuses on developing fast scalable solvers for elliptic PDEs such as Poisson, Stokes and Helmholtz equations. Additionally, a significant contribution of Malhotra’s research has been development of the pvfmm library (Parallel Volume Fast Multipole Method) for evaluating volume potentials efficiently.
2014 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Harshitha Menon is a PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Laxmikant V. Kale.
She researches on developing scalable load balancing algorithms and adaptive run time techniques to improve the performance of large scale dynamic applications. In addition, Harshitha works on optimizing performance of N-body codes, such as the cosmology simulation application ChaNGa, which is a collaborative research project between UIUC and University of Washington.
Alexander Breuer received his diploma in mathematics in 2011 at Technische Universität München (TUM) and is a fourth year doctoral candidate - advised by Prof. Dr. Michael Bader - at the Chair of Scientific Computing at TUM. In 2012 Alexander and his colleagues established a close collaboration between leading experts in computational science and seismology. Declared goal of this international collaboration is one of the grand challenges in seismic modeling: "Multi-physics ground motion simulation for earthquake-engineering, including the complete dynamic rupture process and 3D seismic wave propagation with frequencies resolved beyond 5 Hz".
Alexander’s research covers optimizations in the entire simulation pipeline, which includes node-level performance leveraging SIMD-paradigms, hybrid and heterogeneous parallelization up to machine-size and co-design of numerics and large-scale optimizations. In 2014 Alexander and his collaborators have been awarded with the PRACE ISC Award and received an ACM Gordon Bell nomination for their outstanding end-to-end performance reengineering of the SeisSol software package.
2013 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Jonathan Lifflander is
a fifth-year computer science PhD candidate at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Laximant V. Kale in the Parallel
Programming Laboratory.
He researches scalable parallel algorithms in the context of dynamic
behavior that lead to highly unstructured mappings: load imbalances in
irregular applications, hard system faults, scheduling polices such as
work stealing and energy and power constraints. These algorithms are
demonstrated to be effective on modern supercomputers, reaching beyond
100K cores. Lifflander is first author on full-length papers in the
proceedings of PLDI'13, PPoPP'13, HPDC'12, and IPDPS'12.
Edgar Solomonik received his BS in 2011 from the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was honored for his work with the
prestigious Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding
Undergraduate Research Award for 2010. Solomonik is now a PhD candidate
working on parallel numerical algorithms at University of California,
Berkeley, where he is advised by James Demmel.
His research
focuses on developing algorithms that avoid communication traffic and
scale on high-performance parallel computers. As a graduate student,
Solomonik developed 2.5D algorithms for numerical linear algebra, which
asymptotically lower communication at the cost of limited data
replication. He also engineered a distributed-memory tensor contraction
library which provides key numerical abstractions to the field of
high-accuracy electronic structure calculations.
2012 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Ryan Gabrys received his B.S in Computer Science/Math from the
University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 2005. He received the master
of engineering degree from UCSD with a focus in signals and systems. He
was awarded the SMART scholarship in 2010 and is currently pursuing a
PhD in electrical engineering at UCLA.
Ryan's research interests include information theory and coding schemes
with applications to storage and underwater acoustics. His work in
storage has focused primarily on error-correction codes for Flash
memory. Using experimental data collected from real Flash memory
devices, these codes were demonstrated to prolong the lifetime of the
underlying device by more than 1.5x. His work in underwater acoustics
has been shown to potentially double the possible transmission rate of
current modems used by naval submarines.
Amanda Peters Randles
graduated from Duke University in 2005 with a double major in both Computer
Science and Physics. While at Duke, she worked on a range of projects both fundamental and more applied,
including near-infrared spectroscopy, experimental studies of the Rb/E2F pathway, and bioinformatics
programming. Following her time at Duke she spent spent three years at IBM as part of the Blue Gene
development team where she also founded the IBM New Inventors Connection. In 2010, she received a
Master's Degree in Computer Science from Harvard University, where she is pursuing a PhD in Applied
Physics with a secondary major in Computational Science in Professor Efthimios Kaxiras's group on his
Multiscale Hemodynamics project.
The focus of Amanda's thesis research is a large-scale model coupling the fluid dynamics of blood
plasma coupled with the movement of red blood cells which she hopes will elucidate trends and aid
prognosis of cardiovascular disease based on high-resolution patient-specific data.
2011 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Ignacio Laguna
was born in Panama and received the BSc degree from the University of Panama in 2002.
He is a PhD student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West
Lafayette, Indiana under the supervision of Professor Saurabh Bagchi. He received the MSc degree from
Purdue in 2008.
Ignacio's research interests are fault detection and diagnosis in large-scale distributed applications.
In his PhD dissertation, he proposes techniques to isolate faults that affect large-scale HPC
applications such as those that arise from software bugs, hardware errors and unexpected runtime
conditions. He has developed AutomaDeD, a tool that detects the abnormal tasks and code regions that
are correlated with the manifestation of a fault. AutomaDeD is the first fault-detection framework
that uses task similarity to isolate faults in a scalable manner and it has been demonstrated on the
largest supercomputers with over a hundred thousand processes. His research ideals are to design and
evaluate techniques for the next generation of large-scale parallel debugging and fault-detection tools.
Xinyu Que
Xinyu Que is a Ph.D. candidate of Parallel Architecture and System Laboratory (PASL) in the
Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering at Auburn University. He earned the master's
degree in Computer Science from University of Connecticut in 2009.
Xinyu's research interests include Global Address Space Programming Models, Cloud Computing, MapReduce
and Hadoop, which cover two different areas. The first is scalable runtime systems for Partitioned Global
Address Space (PGAS) programming models on large-scale computing platforms, which seeks to address
scalability challenges for scientific applications running on contemporary petascale supercomputers
such as Jaguar at ORNL, and future exascale system. The second is cloud computing, which aims to
optimize Hadoop to provide high-performance and energy efficient MapReduce programming model for
large-scale data analytics.
2010 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellows
Aparna Chandramowlishwaran is a PhD candidate in the School of Computational Science and Engineering
at Georgia Institute of Technology and is advised by Prof. Richard Vuduc. She received her B.E. in
Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University, India in 2007 and M.S. in Computational Science
and Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2010.
Aparna's main research area is high-performance computing. Her thesis tries to answer fundamental
questions on the design, analysis, and tuning of computational science and engineering algorithms in
light of algorithm-architecture co-design. Aparna is also interested in novel parallel programming
models, and demonstrated the ability of Intel's Concurrent Collections in expressing asynchronous-parallel
algorithms. She has developed one of the fastest implementations and analyses for the Fast Multipole
Method, an N-body computation, and was part of the team that won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in
2010. Aparna is a recipient of the
Best Paper award (software track) at IPDPS 2010. She is a member of ACM, IEEE, and
SIAM.
Amanda Peters Randles
Amanda Peters Randles graduated from Duke University in 2005 with a double major in both Computer
Science and Physics. While at Duke, she worked on a range of projects both fundamental and more applied,
including near-infrared spectroscopy, experimental studies of the Rb/E2F pathway, and bioinformatics
programming. Following her time at Duke she spent spent three years at IBM as part of the Blue Gene
development team where she also founded the IBM New Inventors Connection. In 2010, she received a
Master's Degree in Computer Science from Harvard University, where she is pursuing a PhD in Applied
Physics with a secondary major in Computational Science in Professor Efthimios Kaxiras's group on his
Multiscale Hemodynamics project.
The focus of Amanda's thesis research is a large-scale model coupling the fluid dynamics of blood
plasma coupled with the movement of red blood cells which she hopes will elucidate trends and aid
prognosis of cardiovascular disease based on high-resolution patient-specific data.
Earlier Recipients
2009 Fellows:
Nathan Tallent (Rice University)
Abhinav Bhatele (University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign)
2008 Fellows:
Yaniv Erlich (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Douglas J Mason (Harvard University)
2007 Fellows:
Yong Chen (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Mark Hoemmen (University of California at Berkeley)
Arpith Jacob (Washington University in St. Louis)
Chao Wang (North Carolina State University)
