RCE 26: PLASMA - Parallel Linear Algebra Software for Multicore Architectures

Created on Friday, 12 February 2010 01:35
Written by Brock Palen

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Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Dr. Jack Dongarra and Dr. Jakub Kurzak on PLASMA (http://icl.cs.utk.edu/plasma/) Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures. The main purpose of PLASMA is to address the performance shortcomings of the LAPACK and ScaLAPACK libraries on multicore processors and multi-socket systems of multicore processors.

Jack Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He now holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee and holds the title of Distinguished Research Staff in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Turing Fellow at Manchester University, and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He is the director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He is also the director of the Center for Information Technology Research at the University of Tennessee which coordinates and facilitates IT research efforts at the University.

Jakub Kurzak received his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Wrocław University of Technology, Poland, in 2000 and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston, Texas, in 2005. Afterwards, he joined the Innovative Computing Laboratory in the EECS Department, University of Tennessee, as a Senior Research Associate and is now a Research Scientist in that laboratory. His research focuses on the development of parallel software for numerical scientific computing, with an emphasis on multicore processors and accelerators. He is a member of the team behind ICL's flagship projects, PLASMA and MAGMA.