University of Utah School of Computing professor Mary Hall was awarded a $871,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for an exascale computing project designed to make it easier for programmers to write code for different kinds of high-speed exascale computing systems.

Her project is one of 25 software development proposals funded by the DOE it was announced Thursday, Nov. 10. In all, the first year of funding for these projects total $34 million. These proposals, which come from 25 research and academic institutions, cover many components of the software stack for exascale systems, including programming models and runtime libraries, mathematical libraries and frameworks, tools, lower-level system software, and data management.

Hall’s project involves an autotuning compiler framework called CHiLL. Programmers can write and maintain a single copy of their source code and automatically rewrite the code to produce a variety of high-performance, architecture-specific implementations of exascale computing.

Exascale refers to computing systems at least 50 times faster than the nation’s most powerful supercomputers in use today. Exascale architectures will rely on a diversity of computing processors and memory system technology to provide both high performance and energy efficiency. But to map applications to such hardware, computational scientists may need to rewrite an application for each target architecture. Consequently, it’s an arduous task to rewrite the code, and it can be difficult to maintain.

CHiLL’s autotuning employs empirical techniques and machine learning or heuristic search to evaluate a large collection of functionally equivalent implementations and selects the implementation that delivers the best performance.

The University of Utah is sharing the grant with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. The grant totals $2.72 million over three years.

With nine undergraduates and five graduate students, the School of Computing (SoC) had a record number of attendees at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing conference. The conference was held in Houston October 19-21st, 2016 .

Four of the undergraduate women who attended received scholarships from GHC, each scholarship provided with a travel stipend, registration to the conference and a meal card.

The GHC conference provides attendees a great opportunity to connect with other women in computing and innovative organizations, hear stories from peers and experts and get quality career advice. This year, the SoC was a Bronze sponsor for the event, which hosts over 15,000 attendees over the three-day conference.

“Grace Hopper opened my eyes to sub-fields of computer science I didn’t even know existed. As someone set on pursuing a graduate degree, it really helped to show me what I can focus on in the future,” said Stephanie Georges, an undergraduate student in the School of Computing.

The conference was co-founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney (B.S. ’78, University of Utah) in 1994 and was inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.

The faculty in the School of Computing at the University of Utah is growing with a number of new strategic hires. It’s a great time to be a member of our faculty. We invite you to learn more about these new faculty members and would like to welcome them to the School of Computing.
 
 

Mahdi Nazm Bojnordi (assistant professor, School of Computing) — Mahdi Nazm Bojnordi earned a bachelor’s in computer engineering from Shiraz University in Iran, master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Tehran in Iran and the University of Rochester in New York. He received a doctorate in computer architecture at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in computer architecture, new memory technologies, high-performance memory systems, and energy-efficient computing.

Bei Wang-Phillips (assistant professor, School of Computing) — Bei Wang-Phillips earned a bachelors in computer science and mathematics from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and a doctorate in computer science from Duke University. Her research is in topological data analysis, scientific visualization, information visualization, computational topology, computational geometry, computational biology and bioinformatics, machine learning, and data mining.

Jason Wiese (assistant professor, School of Computing) — Jason Wiese received a bachelor’s in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, and a doctorate in human computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. His research is focused on personal data and human-computer interaction.

Michael Young (professor, Entertainment Arts & Engineering) — Michael Young received his bachelors in computer science at California State University, a master’s in computer science at Stanford University and a doctorate in intelligent systems at the University of Pittsburgh. His research is focused on artificial intelligence, video games and interactive narrative.

Joining the faculty January 2017
Srikumar Ramalingam (associate professor, School of Computing) — Srikumar Ramalingam received his bachelor’s in computer science from Anna University in India and a master’s in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned his doctorate in computer science and applied mathematics at Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes in France. His research is focused on autonomous driving, robotics, computer vision, machine learning, computational photography, deep learning, graph algorithms, and discrete optimization.