APPLICATIONS

New Hires Expand Institute’s Competency in Supercomputing Research: The Georgia Institute of Technology, a national leader in high performance computing research and education, announced the addition of six distinguished researchers to its current roster of experts and luminaries in supercomputing. George Biros, Tom Conte, Pablo Laguna, Deirdre Shoemaker, Ignacio Taboada and David Ballantyne will bring their deep and varied experience from across the computing spectrum and its varied application areas to Georgia Tech to further advance the Institute’s mission to define the technological research university of the 21st century and educate the leaders of a technologically driven world. “As scientists and engineers apply new computational methods to dramatically enhance research and discovery efforts in biomedical engineering, nanoscience, climatology, astrophysics and other fields, the field of high performance computing will continue to grow in size and stature across the country and around the world,” said Dr. Mark Allen, senior vice provost for Research and Innovation at Georgia Tech. “The addition of these computing heavyweights to our high performance computing team further positions Georgia Tech as a global leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress.” George Biros is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Georgia Tech College of Computing’s Computational Science and Engineering division and the College of Engineering’s Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Bioengineering, and Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. Biros chose to continue his distinguished career within the collaborative research environment established by Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Computing and Engineering, focusing on medical imaging and bringing new computational tools into the clinical setting. "Georgia Tech's initiatives in high performance computing and the newly formed Computational Science and Engineering division provide world-class leadership in parallel and scientific computing, new architectures and programming languages, and data and visual analytics for massive datasets,” said Biros. “The members of my research group and I are excited to join such a scholarly environment. With our colleagues in Georgia Tech, we will develop enabling technologies for discovery and innovation that will harness the upcoming breakthroughs in high performance computing—including exascale platforms." Tom Conte is a professor in the Georgia Tech College of Computing’s School of Computer Science. His many professional and industry appointments include past chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture and the past chair of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society Technical Committee on Microprogramming and Microarchitecture. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. An industry leading expert in microarchitectures and a fellow of the IEEE, Conte will continue his work in the areas of manycore/multicore architectures, microprocessor architectures, compiler code generation, architectural performance evaluation and embedded computer systems. “Georgia Tech is a dynamic environment for high performance computing research, rising quickly on the national stage,” said Conte. “I am thrilled to help continue this upward momentum through research to drive the next generation of computer architectures.” Pablo Laguna, Deirdre Shoemaker, Ignacio Taboada and David Ballantyne constitute a “cluster hire” of researchers in Georgia Tech’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. Working in collaboration with computational scientists and physicists, this powerful team of numerical relativists, theorists and experimentalists will use supercomputing to explore extreme astrophysics such as mergers of black holes and neutron stars, central engines of active galactic nuclei, gamma ray bursts, and sources of high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. In establishing the Center of Relativistic Astrophysics earlier this year, Laguna (the center’s director), Shoemaker, Taboada and Ballantyne aim to lead Georgia Tech in using high performance computing technologies to prove the theory of relativity. “I am very excited to work with a great team of researchers to establish a relativistic astrophysics effort at Georgia Tech,” said Laguna. “High performance computing is essential in our research involving the most extreme astrophysical phenomena in the universe, and Georgia Tech's vision in support of computing research is very important to the success of our new endeavor.”