Keeping Up with the Revolution in Computing
Abstract: The end of Dennard or frequency scaling in computer processors nearly twenty years ago has caused a transformation in computing. Innovations in computer architecture have enabled continued improvements in performance, but at the cost of increasing software complexity. GPUs have been key in providing performance for many applications and have enabled the revolution in machine learning and AI. This talk will provide some background on the transformations in computing over the last two decades, describe NCSA and its approach to this revolution in computing, and close with a description of NCSA's efforts in AI.
Bio: William Gropp is Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a professor of Computer Science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and holds a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1982. He was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department of Yale University from 1982-1990 and from 1990-2007, he was a member of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.