Graduate students Mani Zandifar and Alireza Majidi and professors Nancy Amato and Lawrence Rauchwerger were recognized for their research paper at the 2015 International Conference on Supercomputing.
Their paper, “Composing Algorithmic Skeletons to Express High-Performance Scientific Applications,” received the Best Paper Award at the conference in Newport Beach, California. The paper was chosen from over 160 submissions. Selection was based on input from the conference program committee and conference attendees.
Zandifar, Majidi, Amato and Rauchwerger are researchers in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Amato and Rauchwerger serve as co-directors of the Parasol Laboratory where the research was completed. The Parasol Lab researches new computing languages and systems. Researchers develop algorithms and applications that solve computation and data intensive problems.
Their research simplifies the task of writing parallel programs. Using their approach, programmers can compose complex programs from a pre-existing library of short programming blocks called skeletons. In their paper, they used skeletons to construct several large programs that performed well on supercomputers.
“This framework can simplify scientific application development in many fields,” Zandifar said. “It allows researchers to solve complex problems in less time.”
Mustafa Abduljabbar and Dr. David Keyes assisted the group. Abduljabbar, a student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, (KAUST) was a visiting researcher at Texas A&M. Keyes, a professor at KAUST, is the director of the Extreme Computing Research Center in Saudi Arabia.