Alan Edelman
IT Interactive Supercomputing's Star-P Platform for High Performance Computing for MATLAB® and soon other clients such as Python and maybe IDL.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Alan Edelman, will talk about Interactive Supercomputing's Star-P Platform for High Performance Computing for MATLAB® and soon other clients such as Python and maybe IDL. Star-P is a unique technology offered by Interactive Supercomputing after nurturing at MIT. Star-P through its abstractions is solving the ease of use problem that has plagued supercomputing. Given that there have been around 30 parallel MATLABs including three other major offerings, Star-P must be way ahead to compete in the marketplace. Some of the innovative features of Star-P are the ability to program in MATLAB, hook in task parallel codes written using a processor free bstraction, hook in existing parallel codes (MPI users welcome!), and obtain the performance that represents the HPC promise. All this is through a client/server interface. Other clients such as Python or IDL could be possible. The MATLAB, Python, or IDL  becomes the"browser." If we make it look easy, it is because decades of parallel computing experience has taught us that it is not. This talk demonstrates the abstractions and innovations that make this possible.

Dr. Edelman is an authority in the area of high performance computing and numerical algorithms. He learned about parallel computing at Thinking Machines while working on his dissertation in 1988 (on Random Matrix Theory) and has worked on improving the ease of programming and the interoperability of algorithms ever since.

He is a professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, and has served as Head of the Applied Computing Group at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). At MIT he has taught the graduate course on Parallel Scientific Computing since 1993. He brings with him the experience of working with hundreds of students covering the full breadth of engineering, financial and scientific applications.

Doctor Edelman has won numerous prizes in his career among which include Gordon Bell Prize, Householder Prize, Chauvenet Prize, Ford Prize, the MIT 50k warm up award, an NSF faculty career award, a SIAM outstanding Paper Award, and a SIAM Linear Algebra Group Award. In 1980, he was tenth in the nation in the USA Mathematical Olympiad.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Hosts: Jim Fischer and Tony Gualtieri