Forty Years of Parallel Speedup Laws (UT)

Submitted by matt on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 10:11pm.
Share this on Facebook!
11/20/2008 - 2:00pm
11/20/2008 - 3:00pm

Speaker: Dr. John Gustafson
Title: "Forty Years of Parallel Speedup Laws"
Where: RLM 5.118 (UT-Austin)
When: 2:00 PM, Nov 20 Thursday

Abstract:

The multicore era is bringing parallel computing issues to the attention of a new generation of programmers and computer engineers. History is repeating itself as misinterpretations of Amdahl's law (1967) are again cited as obstacles to multicore performance. This talk reviews how the mainstream parallel processing community overcame these hurdles and how the multicore era can avoid having to do it all over again.

Speaker:

Dr. John L. Gustafson is CEO of Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc. (MPT). He was CTO of ClearSpeed before joining MPT, and before ClearSpeed had led the efforts of Sun Microsystems in high-performance computing. Prior to Sun, he was a professor at Iowa State University. His pioneering work on parallel computing in the 1980s led to his receiving the first Gordon Bell Award, and to a revision of Amdahl's law now referred to as "Gustafson's law." His BS is from Caltech, and MS and PhD are from Iowa State, all in Applied Mathematics.

Submitted by softwarejanitor on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 10:34pm.

Interesting... I went to Iowa State while he was a professor there. While I never had him for a class, I can recall seeing him around campus, mostly in the Comp Center/CS building.

Submitted by matt on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 10:42pm.

Oh really? It sounds like a great lecture to attend. I just found out earlier today, and it's a bit short notice for me.

Submitted by softwarejanitor on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 10:48pm.

Yeah, I really can't get away from work tomorrow either. C'Est La Vie.