The keynote will be delivered by Sanjay Kale, the leader of the Charm++ project.

Laxmikant “Sanjay” Kale Parallel Programming Laboratory University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: Characteristics of Adaptive Runtime Systems in HPC

The phrase “Runtime System” is somewhat broad and is used with differing meanings in differing contexts. The Java runtime and most of the MPI runtimes are focused on providing mechanisms. In contrast, adaptive runtime systems emphasize strategies, in addition to providing mechanisms. This talk will look at some characteristics that make HPC RTSs adaptive. These include dynamic load balancing, exploitation of the “principle of persistence” to learn from recent data, automatic allocation to heterogeneous processors, automatic optimization of communication, application reconfiguration via control-points, automated control and optimization of temperature/power/energy/execution-time, automated tolerance of component failures so as to maintain the rate of computational progress in presence of such failures, and adapting to memory availability. The talk will examine these characteristics, and what features are necessary and/or desirable to empower the runtime system. I will illustrate it using examples from the runtime system underlying Charm++ and Adaptive MPI.

Professor Laxmikant Kale is the director of the Parallel Programming Laboratory and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Kale has been working on various aspects of parallel computing, with a focus on enhancing performance and productivity via adaptive runtime systems, and with the belief that only interdisciplinary research involving multiple CSE and other applications can bring back well-honed abstractions into Computer Science that will have a long-term impact on the state-of-art. His collaborations include the widely used Gordon-Bell award winning (SC’2002) biomolecular simulation program NAMD, and other collaborations on computational cosmology, quantum chemistry, rocket simulation, space-time meshes, and other unstructured mesh applications. He takes pride in his group’s success in distributing and supporting software embodying his research ideas, including Charm++, Adaptive MPI and the BigSimframework. He and his team recently won the HPC Challenge award at Supercomputing 2011, for their entry based on Charm++.

L. V. Kale received the B.Tech degree in Electronics Engineering from Benares Hindu University, Varanasi, India in 1977, and a M.E. degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, in 1979. He received a Ph.D. in computer science in from State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1985.

He worked as a scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research from 1979 to 1981. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in 1985, where he is currently employed as a Professor. Prof. Kale is a fellow of the IEEE, and a winner of the 2012 IEEE Sidney Fernbach award.