Type of Talk: ECE Distinguished Lecture Series

Speaker/Aff

iliation: Dr. Burton Smith/Microsoft Research

Date/Time: Thursday, Oc

tober 13, 2011, 4:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Talk Title: "Fin

e-Grain Communication"

Abstract: The changes afoot in computer archite

cture are shifting our focus toward parallel computing in both SIMD and MIM

D style. Despite the skeptics who point to Amdahl''s Law and cite the diffi

culty in making nearly everything run in parallel, the HPC community has h

ad little trouble with Amdahl''s Law thanks to ever-growing problem scale.

The skeptics are right, though; it''s just that the solution they natural

ly 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 architectu

re community. This talk is an attempt to kindle interest in the subject.

Bio: Burton J. Smith, Technical Fellow for Microsoft Corporation, work

s with various groups within the company to define and expand efforts in th

e 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 t

he IEEE and ACM in 1994. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of A

rts and Sciences in 2010. Smith attended the University of New Mexico, whe

re he earned a BSEE degree, and MIT, where he earned SM, EE, and Sc.D d

egrees.