IACS Student Association hosts their first Provost’s Lecture Series speaker

Jack Dongarra will examine the past and the future of high performance computing

By Taylor Ha

Jack Dongarra, a well-known computational scientist, will be delivering a seminar at Stony Brook University through the University’s Provost’s Lecture Series on November 10 at 4pm.

“He’s one of the biggest names there is in the computational science community right now,” said Aimilios Sofianopoulos, the president of the IACS Student Association, which is hosting the lecture. “He was involved in the creation of MPI [which is] the software that allows processes to run in parallel using multiple cores in a computer. Nearly any scientific application using high performance computing from simulations of mechanical hearts to the super-computers handling orders in Amazon’s headquarters have taken advantage of the innovations introduced by Dr. Dongarra’s work.” The idea to invite the renowned speaker originally came from IACS graduate student Verinder Rana. “Jack Dongarra is a key mind in the development of the high performance computing tools,” said Rana. 

Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. His endeavors are numerous, but one of his more prominent achievements is the co-design and implementation of LINPACK Benchmark, an open source numerical software package used to rank the world’s most powerful supercomputers in the annual Top500 List. The author of about 200 publications, Dongarra was also awarded the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award in 2013 for leading the design and promotion of standards for mathematical software used to solve numerical problems in high performance computing (HPC) and is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

In a few weeks, Dongarra will share his wealth of knowledge concerning high performance computing with students and faculty at SBU. Tackling current issues that face HPC, he will focus on redesigning software to fit multicore architectures.

Sofianopoulos said that graduate students and professors who are already familiar with Dongarra’s research will want to attend the event, but for those who don’t fall within that category, listening to his talk is still a rich opportunity. “This is a chance to understand how computational science evolved because Dongarra is actual living history of computational science,” Sofianopoulos said. “We’re expecting a full house.”

The lecture will be held Thursday, November 10 at 4pm in the Charles B. Wang Center, Lecture Hall #2. More information about the upcoming lecture can be found at http://www.iacs.stonybrook.edu/event/seminars/an-overview-of-high-performance-computing-and-challenges-for-the-future.