Seminars

Fine-Grain Communication

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Dr. Burton Smith

Abstract

The changes afoot in computer architecture are shifting our focus toward parallel computing in both SIMD and MIMD style. Despite the skeptics who point to Amdahl's Law and cite the difficulty in making nearly everything run in parallel, the HPC community has had little trouble with Amdahl's Law thanks to ever-growing problem scale. The skeptics are right, though; it's just that the solution they naturally point to, higher single thread performance, is perhaps less effective than another strategy, namely finer parallelism granularity. Accomplishing this will require lower overhead communication among sub-computations, a challenge that has so far been neglected by most of the computer architecture community. This talk is an attempt to kindle interest in the subject.

Speaker Biography

Burton J. Smith, Technical Fellow for Microsoft Corporation, works with various groups within the company to define and expand efforts in the areas of parallel and high performance computing. He received the Seymour Cray Award and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. He received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1991 and was elected a fellow of the IEEE and ACM in 1994. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Smith attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned a BSEE degree, and MIT, where he earned SM, EE, and Sc.D degrees.