Dr. Pavan Balaji

Computer Scientist and Group Lead

Argonne National Laboratory

Supercomputing systems are used everywhere today. Starting with their humble beginnings as tools for large scientific simulations, supercomputing systems are used in almost all aspects of our daily lives today from interactions with friends and family to transportation, education, and the general improvement in the quality of our lives.  As we move from the current generation of supercomputers to the next generation of more powerful systems, all the way to Exascale supercomputers, the needs of end users and their applications is increasing and more importantly broadening the way in which these systems are used.  In this talk I'll discuss some of the new challenges of this new breed of supercomputing applications---such as deep learning, bioinformatics and data sciences---and how we need supercomputing systems to evolve to meet these challenges.

Bio

Dr. Pavan Balaji holds appointments as a Computer Scientist and Group Lead at the Argonne National Laboratory, where he leads the Programming Models and Runtime Systems group.  His research interests include parallel programming models and runtime systems for communication and I/O on extreme-scale supercomputing systems, modern system architecture, cloud computing systems, data-intensive computing, and big-data sciences.  He has nearly 200 publications in these areas and has delivered nearly 200 talks and tutorials at various conferences and research institutes.  He is a recipient of several awards including the IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (Middle Career) in 2015; TEDxMidwest Emerging Leader award in 2013; U.S. Department of Energy Early Career award in 2012; Crain's Chicago 40 under 40 award in 2012; Los Alamos National Laboratory Director's Technical Achievement award in 2005; Ohio State University Outstanding Researcher award in 2005; best paper awards at ACM HPDC 2018, IEEE ScalCom 2013, Euro PVM/MPI 2009, ISC 2009, IEEE Cluster 2008, Euro PVM/MPI 2008, ISC 2008; best paper finalist at IEEE/ACM SC 2014; best poster award at IEEE ICPADS 2018; best poster finalist at IEEE/ACM SC 2014; and best student poster award at ICPP 2018.  He has served as a chair or editor for nearly 50 journals, conferences and workshops, and as a technical program committee member in numerous conferences and workshops.  He is a senior member of the IEEE and a professional member of the ACM.  More details about Dr. Balaji are available at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji.