CSE Symposium Keynote
TITLE: Overcoming the Barriers to Sustained Petaflop Performance
DATE: Thursday, April 13, 2006
TIME: 9:00 A.M.
PLACE: 2240 DCL
1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL
ABSTRACT
The large gap between sustained and peak performance on current high
performance computing platforms remains a serious problem. While there
are many causes, two are commonly mentioned: the difficulty in
achieving good single node performance and the complexity of managing
distributed memory code. Various solutions have been offered to this
problem, including the development of new, high-productivity parallel
languages. To address both of these issues effectively, however, it is
necessary to address the issue of data locality, for both local memory
hierarchies and distributed memory parallelism. Experience shows that
this is a very challenging problem for compilers, even in the most
studied cases, which suggests that a more cooperative approach between
the system software, algorithm designer, and the programmer is
required.
BIOGRAPHY
William Gropp received his B.S. in Mathematics from Case Western
Reserve University in 1977, M.S. in Physics from the University of
Washington in 1978, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in
1982. He held the positions of assistant (1982-1988) and associate
(1988-1990) professor in the Computer Science Department at Yale
University. In 1990, he joined the Numerical Analysis group at
Argonne, where he is a Senior Computer Scientist and Associate Director
of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division, a Senior Scientist in
the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a
Senior Fellow in the Argonne-Chicago Computation Institute. His
research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific
computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations.
He has played a major role in the development of the MPI
message-passing standard. He is co-author of the most widely used
implementation of MPI, MPICH, and was involved in the MPI Forum as a
chapter author for both MPI-1 and MPI-2. He has written many books and
papers on MPI including "Using MPI" and "Using MPI-2". He is also one
of the designers of the PETSc parallel numerical library, and has
developed efficient and scalable parallel algorithms for the solution
of linear and nonlinear equations.