Allan Snavely is Associate Director
at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and
an Adjunct Associate Professor in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) both at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Besides running a research lab at SDSC he also serves on the executive committee for the inter-departmental CSME program in computational science, mathematics, and engineering, is the computer science faculty advisor to the Free Clinic Project and shares running CSE294 Largescale Systems Seminar (alternating quarters) with Professor Scott Baden of CSE.
He is a noted
expert in high performance computing (HPC), has published more than 70 papers with more than 1,000 citations on this
subject (his current h-index is 15) , he has presented numerous invited talks including briefing U.S. congressional staff on
the importance of the field to economic competitiveness, has twice been a finalist for the Gordon Bell
Prize (2007 and 2008) in recognition for outstanding achievement in HPC applications, and in 2009 shared the
SC09 Storage Challenge Award for the design of Dash, an innovative new supercomputer that makes extensive use of flash memory.
Dash is just a prototype of a much larger system he and and his team are
building, Gordon, to be delivered in mid 2011.
He is Co-pricipal investigator, and Co-architect
of
Gordon: A Data Intensive Supercomputer
.
Here is a video interview with Linux Magazine about the project.
In 2000, he established the
Performance Modeling and Characterization Laboratory
where he has supervised numerous graduate
students (both MS and Ph.D), post-docs, visiting scholars, and senior research staff. His
research interests cover a wide spectrum in the areas of high
performance computing. A common thread among his
research projects focuses on understanding, and improving the Von Neumann Bottleneck that limited throughput (data transfer rate) between the CPU and memory compared to the amount of memory that in turn limits the performance of computers past and modern.
Allan Snavely received his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the
University of California, San Diego
Selected Publications with Impact on High Performance Computing
-
High-Frequency Simulations of Global Seismic Wave Propagation Using SPECFEM3D_GLOBE on 62K Processors"
,
In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing
, (SC08), Austin, Texas.
(with Laura Carrington, Dimitri Komatitsch, Michael Laurenzano, Mustafa Tikir, David Michéab, Nicolas Le Goff, Allan Snavely, Jeroen Tromp).
- "
WRF Nature Run
",
In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing
, (SC07), Reno, Nevada,
November 10-13, 2007. pp. 32-41. (with J. Michalakes, J. Hacker, R. Loft,
M. O. McCracken, N. Wright, T. Spelce, B. Gorda, B. Walkup).
- "
Metrics for Ranking the Performance of Supercomputers
", Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch Journal:Special Issue on High Productivity
Computer Systems
, Vol. 2, Number 4,
2007. (with T. Chen, M. Gunn, B. Simon, and L. Carrington).
-
An earlier version of this work was presented `by invitation of the Congress of the United States'
at the Rayburn Building, District of Columbia, November 14th 2005
(MS Power Point)
-
"A Genetic Algorithms Approach to Modeling the Performance of Memory-bound Computations",
In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing
, (SC07), Reno, Nevada,
November 10-13, 2007. pp. 82-94. (
with M. Tikir, L. Carrington, E. Strohmaier).
- "
A Framework for Application Performance Modeling and Prediction
",
In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing
, (SC02), Baltimore, Maryland,
November 10-13, 2002. pp. 112-123. (
with L. Carrington, N. Wolter, J. Labarta, R. Badia, A. Purkayastha
).
Students Graduated
Dr. Jon Weinberg of Meyertons, Hood, Kivlin, Kowert & Goetzel
Dr. Feng Gao of Microsoft
Dr. Cynthia Lee
Greg Lee M.S. of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Omid Khalili M.S. of Apple
David Tamjidi M.S. of Innovery SpA (Italy)
Current Ph.D. Students
Michael O. McCracken
Jiahua He
Catherine Olschanowsky
Community service, mentoring and teaching
- ExaScale Computing Study:
Technology Challenges in
Achieving Exascale Systems (pdf)
Peter Kogge, William Dally, Shekar Borkhar, Steven Scott, Allan Snavely, and illustrious others.
- Workshop Report: Petascale Computing in the Geosciences. Edited by: Allan Snavely, Rob Pennington, and Richard Loft
- Workshop Report: Petascale Computing in the Biological Sciences. Edited by: Allan Snavely, Gwen Jacobs, and David A. Bader
- SDSC Profile Piece: Why are real benchmarks important in High Performance Computing?
- Presentation to Congressional Staff in Science 101 series: Who needs a supercomputer? (PPT)
- PMaC Laboratory Webpages
- Recent Publications
- Student Theses
- CSE294 Largescale Systems Seminar
- CSE141 Introduction to Computer Architecture
- CSE231 Advanced Compilers
- CSE260 Parallel and Scientific Computing
- The Free Clinic Project
Projects
- Blue Waters Snavely and his PMaC lab are funded by NSF to assist the Blue Waters project with application performance modeling.
- Gordon Snavely is Co-PI of the Gordon supercomputer project.
- Performance Evaluation Research Institute Snavely is a Co-PI and leads the performance modeling thrust of PERI.
Other interests
- Cycling and Triathlon
