Faculty Profiles

high performance computing

Capsule Bio:

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 18) , 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-principal investigator, and Co-architect of Gordon: A Data Intensive Supercomputer . 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