IACS Student Na Zhang Wins Silver Medal at SC 2015

IACS Student Na Zhang, third from left, is presented with her silver medal award at SC15

Ms. Na Zhang, a doctoral student of IACS Affiliate Professor Yuefan Deng in Applied Mathematics & Statistics, won the silver medal at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition (SRC) at Supercomputing 2015 (SC15) held in Austin, Texas November 15th-20th. Her winning work was entitled “Efficient Multiscale Platelets Modeling using Supercomputers.”

SC15 is the annual international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis that was established in 1988 by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. It's a yearly "must attend" forum for the high performance computing community and one of the more prestigious international conferences, attracting more than 12,000 scientists, engineers, and business leaders from around the world. The ACM SRC, sponsored by Microsoft Research, is an internationally recognized venue enabling undergraduate and graduate students to present work before a panel of judges and interact with top researchers.

For this research competition, Na presented her work involving mathematical models, multiscale simulation methodologies, algorithmic accelerations as well as heterogeneous computing techniques for efficient modeling of platelets, the crucial factors for triggering blood clotting. During the competition, Na Zhang first competed in a poster session that was open to all conference participants. Then 26 poster competitors were selected from 65 applicants. Finally, 11 finalists, including 4 undergraduate and 7 graduate students, were selected by an ACM SRC committee to compete in a presentation session. Na Zhang won second place among the three graduate winners and received her award at the SC15 awards ceremony. 

Na Zhang successfully defended her PhD work entitled “Design and Analysis of Parallel Algorithms for Multiscale Modeling of Platelets” on October 28th, 2015 and will officially graduate in December. She will start her new job at VMware, Inc., fully leveraging on her talent and knowledge in high performance computing.