News and Announcements
Welcome to ICL
As we get underway for the 2014 – 2015 academic year, we would like to welcome some new students to the Innovative Computing Laboratory. Every year, ICL recruits some of the best and brightest in Computer Science and Computer Engineering to help push ICL and UTK to the forefront of High Performance Computing research.
The Distributed Computing group (DisCo) picked up 4 students this year—David Eberius (GRA), Xi Luo (GRA), Stephen Richmond (URA), and Chunyan Tang (GRA). The Performance Analysis group also picked up a new student this fall—Sangamesh Ragate (GRA). Welcome to ICL!
New ICL Website
Under the creative direction of David Rogers, ICL’s communications team has been developing a new website for ICL. The new site utilizes a Drupal back end and features a completely new look and advanced publications database. David gave a live demo of the site during the ICL retreat, and now invites ICLers to check out the website for themselves. Please keep in mind that the website is currently in Alpha, so there are some additional features that will be rolled out for the final release, and the up-time is not guaranteed.
Conference Reports
2014 ICL Retreat
The 2014 ICL Retreat brought the team back to the RT Lodge in Maryville, TN. The best weather in recent memory served as a backdrop for the ICLers, new and old, while the crew at the RT lodge took very good care of their guests. On the business end, the retreat was two solid days of talks covering student projects and summer internships, the lab’s progress in the areas of linear algebra, distributed computing, benchmarking, and performance analysis, along with recaps of administrative procedures.
It wasn’t all so serious, and the RT Lodge catered great food and plenty of refreshments for ICLers who seemed more thirsty than hungry. Serving as a kickoff to the fall semester, the retreat encourages us to keep our focus sharp, our determination strong, and to have another great year at ICL!
Recent Releases
MAGMA 1.5.0 Released
MAGMA 1.5.0 is now available. This release provides performance improvements for SVD and eigenvector routines and adds sparse routines. More information is given in the MAGMA: a New Generation of Linear Algebra Libraries for GPU and Multicore Architectures presentation as well as the MAGMA Quick Reference Guide. The MAGMA 1.5.0 release adds the following new functionalities:
- SVD using Divide and Conquer (gesdd);
- Nonsymmetric eigenvector computation is multi-threaded (trevc3_mt);
- Sparse functions; and
- Doxygen documentation.
Parameters (trans, uplo, etc.) now use symbolic constants (MagmaNoTrans, MagmaLower, etc.) instead of characters (‘N’, ‘L’, etc.). Converters are provided to translate these to LAPACK, CUBLAS, and CBLAS constants. There are also improved testers and numerous bug fixes.
Visit the software page to download the tarball.
Interview
Reazul Hoque
Where are you from, originally?
I am from Bangladesh. It is a small country with high (read: extremely high) population density, sandwiched between India and Myanmar. I am from a city named Chittagong. I was born and raised there until I moved to the capital (Dhaka) for my undergraduate studies.
Can you summarize your educational background?
I completed my undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Information Technology at IUT (Islamic University of Technology). Currently, I am a PhD student here at UT and working at ICL as a Graduate Research Assistant.
Tell us how you first learned about ICL.
When searching for a graduate school, I applied to 10 different universities in the US. Funding was mandatory for me to pursue my higher studies. I was interested in distributed computing, and I first learned about ICL when I was applying to UT.
What made you want to work for ICL?
ICL is one of the best research labs in the world for HPC. Pursuing a PhD is important to me, and I always wanted to work in a place with a cutting edge research agenda, awesome mentors, and rich resources—both in personnel and infrastructure. For me, when considering all of those factors, ICL was the best match.
What are you working on while at ICL?
I am working on an interface for PaRSEC under the guidance of Geroge Bosilca, Anthony Danalis, Thomas Herault, and Aurelien Bouteiller. This new interface will allow users to insert tasks in the PaRSEC scheduler more easily and dynamically. This new interface also has a different approach to building DAGs and representing dependencies than the current interface.
If you weren’t working at ICL, where would you like to be working and why?
I would like to work for a software company like Linkedin, MathWorks, etc. if I wasn’t working for ICL. The learning opportunities in these sorts of companies are tremendous and the working environments are great too.
What are your interests/hobbies outside work?
I like sports a lot and I used to play accordingly (a lot) too. I like playing Cricket, Tennis, Soccer, pool/billiards, table tennis, swimming. I also like shooting (guns of course).
I am also learning photography and one of my favorite leisure time activities is driving around in the beautiful city of Knoxville. The fact that I love driving is implied here. 🙂
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise people.
Since my sophomore year I have been a big fan of web development, and I love making web applications. The fact that the front end is slick and can be coded pretty easily is one of the major reasons behind my fascination with it. Also, the result of the development can be seen quickly, which is a bonus.
