George Michael HPC Fellowships Announced

ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) and IEEE Computer Society have named Harshitha Menon of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC) and Alexander Breuer of Technische Universität München (TUM) as recipients of 2014 ACM/IEEE Computer Society George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Menon and Breuer will each receive a $5,000 honorarium, plus travel and registration to receive the award at SC14 during the awards ceremony in November.

A doctoral candidate advised by Laxmikant V. Kale at UIUC, Harshitha Menon’s research focuses on scalable load-balancing algorithms and adaptive run-time techniques to improve the performance of large-scale dynamic applications. In addition, Menon works on optimizing performance for N-body codes, such as the cosmology simulation application ChaNGa. She won recognition for her paper “Scalable Load Balancing and Adaptive Run Time Techniques.”

Menon is an exemplary contributor in HPC with her ability to bring to light HPC applications in science and improve research and work in HPC overall. “Menon has taken on two challenging HPC research problems—load balancing and code optimization for N-body simulations—and she is working tirelessly to solve them,” said David A. Bader, professor and chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering and chair of the 2014 Fellowship Committee. “Menon’s strong collaborative work and dedication to improving HPC applications is inspiring.”

Alexander Breuer, doctoral student at TUM, actively works on improving performance for highly resolved dynamic rupture and seismic wave simulations. Breuer pushes time-to-solution for the SeisSol software package in terms of superior numeric and high-performance optimizations. He was a member of the team to receive the PRACE award at ISC14 and he is also part of the 2014 ACM Gordon Bell Prize submission for seismic simulations, “Petascale High Order Dynamic Rupture Earthquake Simulations on Heterogeneous Supercomputers.” He won recognition for his project, “Petascale High Order Earthquake Simulations.”

“By researching and simulating seismic waves, we can better identify regions exposed to severe ground motions and support engineers in planning and constructing human developments,” said Trish Damkroger, SC14 Conference Chair and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Deputy Associate Director At-Large for Computation. “We can expect great things from Breuer in HPC. His strong integration of mathematics, software development, and HPC into his work in SeisSol is truly brilliant.”

Endowed in memory of George Michael, a founding father of the SC Conference series, the ACM IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial Fellowships honor exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers that are currently available.

Fellowship recipients are selected based on their project’s research excellence, their technical interests’ alignment with the HPC community, academic progress, faculty advisors’ recommendations, and study plans to enhance HPC-related skills. For more information about the fellowship, visit http://sc14.supercomputing.org/program/awards/acmieee-cs-george-michael-memorial-hpc-fellowship.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional

About IEEE Computer Society

IEEE Computer Society is the world’s leading computing membership organization and the trusted information and career-development source for a global workforce of technology leaders including: professors, researchers, software engineers, IT professionals, employers, and students. The unmatched source for technology information, inspiration, and collaboration, the IEEE Computer Society is the source that computing professionals trust to provide high-quality, state-of-the-art information on an on-demand basis. The Computer Society provides a wide range of forums for top minds to come together, including technical conferences, publications, and a comprehensive digital library, unique training webinars, professional training, and the TechLeader Training Partner Program to help organizations increase their staff’s technical knowledge and expertise, as well as the personalized information tool myComputer. To find out more about the community for technology leaders, visit http://www.computer.org.

About SC14

SC14, sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, a world class exhibit area, demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on learning. For more information on SC14, please visit: http://sc14.supercomputing.org.

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