Prof. Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: Parallel programming is a discipline within computer science, but its utility is felt in physical sciences and engineering. Simulations running on parallel supercomputers and clusters are used for deepening humanity's understanding of the universe via computational science and help us design better artifacts via computational engineering. My own work has involved interdisciplinary collaborations. For example, the NAMD code is used for simulations of biomolecules including recent coronavirus simulations. Another program named ChaNGa is used for cosmological simulations involving regular matter, dark matter and dark energy, interacting via gravity and gas dynamics. I will describe these and other applications and my experience in collaborative research that resulted in them. More importantly, I will describe how these applications are useful for creating interest and even passion among students about parallel programming. I will also describe how elementary parallel programming exercises can be constructed in the context of such science/engineering applications.
Speaker Bio: Prof. Kale has been working on various aspects of parallel computing, with a focus on enhancing performance and productivity via adaptive runtime systems, and with the belief that only interdisciplinary research involving multiple CSE and other applications can bring back well-honed abstractions into Computer Science that will have a long-term impact on the state-of-art.
His collaborations include the widely used Gordon-Bell award winning (SC 2002) biomolecular simulation program NAMD, and other collaborations on computational cosmology, quantum chemistry, rocket simulation, space-time meshes, and other unstructured mesh applications. He takes pride in his group's success in distributing and supporting software embodying his research ideas, including Charm++, Adaptive MPI and Charm4Py. He and his team won the HPC Challenge award at Supercomputing 2011, for their entry based on Charm++. Prof. Kale is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and a winner of the 2012 IEEE Sidney Fernbach award.