Colloquium Details
Rethinking Productivity and Performance for the Exascale Era
| Author: | Professor Allen D. Malony University of Oregon |
|---|---|
| Date: | October 23, 2014 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Abstract
The push to exascale systems is forcing the parallel computing community to rethink fundamental notions of productivity and performance. The rapidly growing degrees of parallelism brought on by manycore processors is just one aspect of an evolving landscape of architectural, system, and software features that is increasing the complexity of the application development and optimization process. It is becoming more apparent that in order to address the complexity concerns unfolding in the exascale space, we must think of productivity and performance in a more connected way and the technology to support them as being more open, integrated, and intelligent. This talk will look at the outcome of recent workshops on the topic of high-performance computing (HPC) and productivity. It will then discuss directions for parallel performance research and tools that target the scalability, optimization, and programmability challenges of next-generation HPC platforms with high-productivity as an essential outcome. The talk will begin with an overview of our parallel performance research activity.
Biography
Dr. Allen D. Malony is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Unversity of Oregon. Malony received the B.S. and M.S. degress in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1980 and 1982, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 1990. From 1981 to 1985, Malony worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. From 1986 to 1991, he was a Senior Software Engineer at the University of Illinois Center for Supercomputing Research and Development, where he was the leader of the performance evaluation project for the Cedar multiprocessor. In 1991, Malony joined the faculty at Oregon, spending his first year as a Fulbright Research Scholar and visiting Professor at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. Dr. Malony was awarded the NSF National Young Investigator award in 1994. In 1999 he was a Fulbright Research Scholar to Austria resident at the University of Vienna. Dr. Malony was awarded the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2002. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2004.
Dr. Malony's research interests are in parallel computing, performance analysis, supercomputing, and scientific software environments. Scalable high-performance computing (HPC) poses challenging problems for characteriziing and understanding performance behavior and applying analysis results to application code tuning. The Performance Research Laboratory (PRL), directed by Malony, works on projects, funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, to develop parallel performance measurement and analysis tools. In particular, the TAU performance system is a state-of-the-art, open source performance toolsuite created by PRL and used widely in national laboratories and HPC research centers. Current research includes work in automatic performance diagnosis, kernel and I/O performance analysis, and performance data mining.
Dr. Malony's research interests extend to computing and information processing systems for neuroscience research. He is the Director of the NeuroInformatics Center (NIC) at the University of Oregon. The NIC is developing advanced integrated neuroimaging tools that combine EEG and MRI methods for next-generation brain analysis. Grid technologies and high-performance computing are being used by the NIC to prototype network-based systems for medical service delivery.