The University of New Mexico (UNM) has announced that Amanda Bienz, an assistant professor in the department of computer science, has secured a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her project. The project aims to align parallel computer application performance with hardware capabilities and is funded by the NSF's Software and Hardware Foundations Program and EPSCoR. Its focus is on optimizing supercomputer performance.
The project, titled "Towards Exascale Performance of Parallel Applications," will run from February 1, 2024, to January 31, 2029. With a budget of $557,000, it seeks to enhance the performance of parallel applications on supercomputers. According to a press release by UNM, the project supports one graduate and one undergraduate student. It acknowledges the increasing power of successive supercomputer generations that handle vast amounts of data for diverse simulations - from weather forecasting to medical research such as cancer treatment.
"The hardware performance is there, but the applications cannot currently take full advantage of the hardware power," said Bienz according to a press release by UNM.
"I work with many application developers, and many programmers cite this issue as one that needs addressing," Bienz stated in another press release by UNM.
"The main idea is to change the performance level of the applications so that when hardware advances in the future, the applications can keep up," said Bienz. "Data is now moving to GPUs [graphics processing units] instead of CPUs [central processing units]. We need to understand why we get the performance we get, and why the applications do not match the expected performance."
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), an autonomous federal agency, champions science and engineering endeavors across all 50 states and U.S. territories. According to its About webpage, NSF primarily fulfills its mission through grants which contribute significantly to federal support for basic research at American colleges and universities.
