A reception will be held immediately after the lecture.

Live Video Stream:  http://media.cs.uiuc.edu/live/upcrc.asx
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Title:   Four Important Concepts to Consider when Using High Performance Computers

Speaker:   Jack Dongarra, Director of the Innovative Computer Laboratory and the Center for Information Technology Research, University of Tennessee

Abstract:    In this talk, Dongarra examines how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-years and looks toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile-time and run-time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run-time environment variability will make these problems much harder.

Dongarra looks at four areas of research that will have an importance impact in the development of software with a focus on the following themes:

• Redesign of software to fit multicore architectures
• Automatically tuned application software
• Exploiting mixed precision for performance
• The importance of fault tolerance

Bio:    Jack Dongarra specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published approximately 200 articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda and he is coauthor of several books. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches and in 2008 he was the recipient of the first IEEE Medal of Excellence in Scalable Computing.

Dongarra holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee and holds the title of Distinguished Research Staff in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Turing Fellow at Manchester University, and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He is the director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He is also the director of the Center for Information Technology Research at the University of Tennessee which coordinates and facilitates IT research efforts at the University. Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980.

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This lecture is also part of the Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the The Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT).

NOTE: Presentation video and slides are often posted online following the seminar.