Allan Snavely is the
Director of the Performance Modeling and Characterization Laboratory at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California,
San Diego.
He is a noted
expert in high performance computing (HPC), has published more than 50 papers on this
subject, has presented numerous invited talks including briefing U.S. congressional staff on
the importance of the field to economic competitiveness, was a finalist for the Gordon Bell
Prize 2007 in recognition for outstanding achievement in HPC applications, and is primary
investigator (PI) on several federal research grants. Notably, he is PI of the Cyberinfrastructure Evaluation Center supported by National Science Foundation, and Co-PI in charge of
the performance modeling thrust for PERI (the Performance Evaluation Research Institute),
a Department of Energy SciDAC2 institute.
In 2000, he established the PMaC 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
- "
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. Feng Gao of Microsoft
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
Jon Weinberg
Cynthia Lee
Michael O. McCracken
Jiahua He
Catherine Olschanowsky
- Academic C.V. (pdf)
- Research Statement (pdf)
- 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 Fall 2005, Spring 2006
- CSE141 Introduction to Computer Architecture
- CSE231 Advanced Compilers
- CSE260 Parallel and Scientific Computing
- Top 500 List
- The "Wave" picture
- Poetry Corner
- Cycling