Srinivas Yadav is a final year under-graduate student pursuing a Bachelors in Computer Science in India. He has been working for STE||AR Group for 8 months now and is interested in the area of vectorization in the field of HPC. He has worked on HPX for the project “Adding par_simd implementations to parallel algorithms”.

Srinivas relied on guidance from STE||AR Group members, Prof. Hartmut Kaiser, Nikunj Gupta, and Auriane Reverdell, to work through his GSoC project.

Srinivas published and presented the paper “Parallel SIMD – A Policy Based Solution for Free Speed-Up using C++ Data-Parallel Types at ESPM2, SC21 in November 2021.

While working with STE||AR Group and HPX Srinivas has learned more about the field of computer science and programming. He learned how to use HPC clusters, and was given remote access to Rostam Cluster at LSU, CCT by Hartmut Kaiser to run SIMD benchmarks on different machines available. Currently, Srinivas is working remotely on Ookami Cluster at Stony Brook University to perform the SIMD benchmarks for ARM machines (on A64FX node) and working with octo-tiger to  port new vectorization backends which could be used to run the octo-tiger benchmarks on these nodes

He also learned the importance of collaboration with different researchers from different time zones. Getting international schedules together can be tricky!

Currently, Srinivas is working on three key areas

First is adapting algorithms to SIMD policies in HPX. The main aim of this task is to adapt as many algorithms as possible to SIMD execution policies in HPX, which contributes to fixing #2333.

Second is to port std::experimental::simd to Octo-Tiger. There are many kernels in Octo-Tiger library which currently use HPX-Kokkos with Vc library for vectorization, but now Vc is deprecated and the plan isto replace it with std::experimental::simd.

Finally, porting the EVE library as a new vectorization/simd backend to HPX. HPX currently has two vectorization backends, a newer one is std::experimental::simd, the older one is Vc (now deprecated) so needs to be replaced by a newer library and EVE seems to be perfect fit for that slot.

Srinivas has applied to LSU for a masters in Computer Science for the coming Fall Semester 2022.  He is very excited to come to CCT and LSU!

Other than academics/work, Srinivas enjoys playing badminton, watching and playing cricket and exploring new places/traveling a lot. Recently, he started learning cooking and learning a new Indian language (Tamil).

Alireza Kheirkhahan is an IT Consultant in the STE||AR Group at LSU.  He received his B.S in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran and his master’s in computer science from LSU.

Alireza’s master thesis focused on I/O backend and Storage solutions. His main research focus is High Performance Computing, I/O Systems, high-throughput, redundant and distributed storage systems

Alireza designed and implemented STE||AR Group at LSU’s small research cluster, Rostam. Since 2015, he manages and improves this cluster. Currently, the second generation of the computer cluster is in use, and the next generation is in design. Rostam consists of nearly 80 compute nodes and multiple storage servers. Over the course of the years, more than a dozen graduate students used Rostam for their thesis work, and more than thirty scientific publications have been created using this cluster.

On the CERA (Coastal Emergency Risk Assessment) project, Alireza acts as residing high performance specialist. He carries the specific hpc tasks for domain scientists.  He adapts and maintains their computational needs in HPC clusters provided by LSU and the State of Louisiana. 

Alireza designed and implemented a special purpose storage system for CERA projects. CERA has a particular need for a specific storage solution. The application creates bursts of gigabytes of data at once and goes quite for few hours until another burst arrives. The recently generated data is highly valued and must have very quick and reliable access, but the older data must be archived with a cost-effective manner. With his research background, Alireza designed the new storage system to carry out both tasks at once, which reduced the data transfer time significantly and increased reliability.

Alireza lives in Baton Rouge, with his wife Shahrzad and son Damon. In his spare time, he enjoys woodworking and tinkering with electronics. 

CppCast, hosted by Jason Turner and JeanHeyd Meneide, is the first podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. Since 2015 CppCast has been having conversations with C++ conference speakers, library authors, writers, ISO committee members and more.

Hartmut Kaiser and Mikael Simberg of the STE||AR Group joined Jason and JeanHeyd for a podcast episode recently. They discussed some blog posts on returning multiple values from a function and C++ Ranges. Then they talk about the latest version of HPX, how easy it is to gain performance improvements with HPX, and DLA Futures, the Distributed Linear Algebra library built using HPX.

To listen to the podcast episode, click here.

Patrick Diehl is a research scientist here in the STE||AR Group at CCT – LSU. He is definitely one of our most active members!  In addition to his extensive research activities and numerous publications, Patrick also teaches in the LSU Math Department and has organized several workshops and events.

Before joining LSU, Patrick was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Multiscale Mechanics at Polytechnique Montreal. He received his diploma in computer science at the University of Stuttgart and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the university of Bonn.

Patrick created and hosted the virtual CAIRO colloquium series in the Spring.  Speakers from across the country, and even internationally, joined to discuss various AI (artificial intelligence) topics.  The series was an overall success and will continue in the Fall.

Patrick is the liaison for universities in Louisiana for the Texas and Louisiana section of the Society for Applied and Industrial Mathematics (SIAM). He is a topic editor for the Journal for Open Source Software (JOSS) for computational fracture mechanics, applied mathematics, C++, asynchronous and task-based programming.

Patrick also cohosts a podcast – FLOSS For Science – with episodes that showcase free, libre and open source software uses in science with the aim to advocate for the usage of Open Source software in academia and higher education.

Patrick’s main research interests are:

Computational engineering with the focus on peridynamic material models for the application in solids, like glassy or composite materials

High performance computing, especially the asynchronous many task system (ATM), e.g. the C++ standard library for parallelism and concurrency (HPX) for large heterogeneous computations.

In addition, Patrick has a deep interest in the usage of Open Source software to enhance the openness of Science. With respect to teaching, he is interested to develop tools to easily introduce C++ and parallel computing to non-computer science students.

Patrick lives in Baton Rouge with his wife Sylvia and their young daughter Ava.  Aside from all the great work he does at LSU, he’s an active family man and enjoys trips to the park and gymnastics lessons for Ava.  Some of their favorite activities are enjoying the local Cajun food and visiting the amazing BREC parks.

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