Staci Smith 2019 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellow

Fifth-year Ph.D student Staci Smith was named one of two fellows worldwide to receive the prestigious 2019 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship.  She is being recognized for her innovative work in understanding and alleviating inter-job network interference on modern supercomputers. In her research, Smith has pinpointed the cause of network congestion due to such interference as well as developed a novel technique, called “Adaptive Flow-Aware Routing” (or AFAR), that re-routes traffic from heavily-loaded routers to lightly-loaded ones---at the granularity of an entire flow.  Results on a 1,296-node supercomputer show improvements of up to 46% for applications that communicate extensively. Smith is currently working on approaches in job schedulers to further reduce inter-job network interference.

According to the ACM/IEEE, “The ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship is endowed in memory of George Michael, one of the founding fathers of the SC Conference series. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage or large-scale data analytics using the most powerful computers that are currently available. The fellowship includes a $5,000 honorarium and travel expenses to attend SC19 in Denver, Colorado, November 17-22, 2019, where the fellowships will be formally presented.”

For further details on the award, please see https://www.computer.org/press-room/2019-news/2019-acm-ieeecs-george-michael-memorial-hpc-fellowship-recipients-smith-fernando