Events & News
CS Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Thursday, January 15, 2015 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Concludes | 12:15 pm |
| Location | Gould-Simpson 906 |
| Details | Please join us for coffee and light refreshments at 11am in Gould-Simpson 906. Faculty Host: Dave Lowenthal |
| Speaker | Michelle Mills Strout |
| Title | PhD |
| Affiliation | Colorado State University |
The High Performance Computing Juggling Act
Computational science and engineering applications such as Partial Differential Equations (PDE) solvers have demanded high performance computing for decades. Such applications are often implemented using message passing paradigms such as MPI. MPI has scalable performance on distributed memory machines, and many libraries such as PETSc and OP2 focus on improving the ease in which PDE solvers can be developed with MPI. The problem is that now each node in a distributed memory machine has multicore or many core parallelism, where shared memory parallelism needs to be specified and data locality is the main bottleneck for scalable performance. In this talk, I will overview a number of projects in my research group where we work toward juggling parallelism, data locality, expressivity, ease of use, and correctness in the context of high-performance PDE solvers. Our aim is to provide higher-level programming abstractions for algorithms and implementation details and have the compiler automate much of the complex juggling needed.
Biography
Michelle is an associate professor in the computer science department at Colorado State University. Dr. Strout's main research area is high performance computing and her research interests include compilers and run-time systems, scientific computing, and software engineering. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego in 2003, was an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Scholar at Argonne National Laboratory and a Research Associate at the University of Chicago for two years, and started as an assistant professor at CSU in 2005. In 2008, Michelle received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for her research in parallelization techniques for irregular applications, such as molecular dynamics simulations. In 2010, she received a DOE Early Career award to fund her research in separating the specification of scientific computing applications from the specification of implementation details such as how to parallelize such computations. Michelle lives with her partner and two boys ages 10 and 14 in beautiful Fort Collins, Colorado.