Again this year, IBM has recognized that CSE graduate students are doing quality work. For the 2007 - 2008 academic year, Sriram Kristhnamoorthy will be an IBM Ph.D. Fellow and Wei Huang will receive a Ph.D. Scholarship. Both students are members of the Systems group, the same group that received IBM awards in 2006.
Sriram, working under the mentorship of Professor P. Sadayappan in the High-Performance and Parallel Computing lab, is currently focusing on the design and implementation of a runtime environment for efficient execution of the code generated by the tensor contraction expressions engine (TCE), an optimized code generation system for quantum chemistry calculations. Additionally, his recent work on the trade-off between load-balance, start-up cost and computation cost on certain pipelined stencil codes has been accepted for publication at the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Parallel Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'07). As part of the IBM fellowship, Sriram will be interning at the IBM TJ Watson research lab, continuing his work on a runtime library for the X10 programming language, which focuses on programmer productivity.
Huang is currently a PhD student in the Network Based Computing Laboratory (NBCL), led by Professor D.K. Panda. Huang's research topic, High Performance Computing (HPC) with Virtual Machines, is aimed at achieving both high performance and high productivity computing via modern Virtual Machine (VM) technologies. On the MPI front, Huang is also involved in the design of MVAPICH/MVAPICH2 (high performance MPI over modern Interconnects) software, which is being used by more than 470 organizations world-wide.
The IBM Fellowship program is a prestigious and highly competitive international competition which honors exceptional PhD students. Award recipients are selected based on their overall potential for research excellence, the degree to which their technical interests align with those of IBM and their progress to-date.