Dr. Valerie Taylor of Argonne National Laboratory will deliver two addresses about high-performance computing while at Hope College on Wednesday and Thursday, March 6 and 7, through the college’s Gentile Interdisciplinary Lecture series in the natural and applied sciences.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
She will present “High-Performance Computing: A Case for Performance Analysis” on Wednesday, March 6, at 7 p.m. in Winants Auditorium of Graves Hall. She’ll provide an overview of systems like Argonne National Laboratory’s Theta supercomputer and how they’re important for large-scale applications in physics and engineering, and present research results from the continuing effort to improve their performance.
She will present “Exploring the Tradeoffs Between Performance and Power for Parallel Applications” on Thursday, March 7, at 11 a.m. in Schaap Auditorium on the lower level of the Jim and Martie Bultman Student Center. She will discuss the challenge of providing even larger high-performance computing systems capable of handling even more complex applications quickly while also managing the greater power needs of the systems themselves.
Taylor is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, which is a multidisciplinary science and engineering research center in Lemont, Illinois, west of Chicago. Her research is in the area of high-performance computing, with a focus on performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications. She is also the chief executive officer and president of the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT, and is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Before joining Argonne National Laboratory, Taylor served at Texas A&M University as head of the computer science and engineering departments, senior associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering, and also a Regents Professor and the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Prior to her time at Texas A&M, she was a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University for 11 years.
The Gentile Interdisciplinary Lectureship at Hope was established in 2005 by faculty colleagues, former students and friends of Dr. James Gentile. Gentile joined the Hope faculty in 1976 and served as dean for the natural and applied sciences from 1988 to 2005, when he became president of Research Corporation, a private foundation in Tucson, Arizona, that supports basic research in the physical sciences. After retiring from Research Corporation, he returned to Hope to serve a two-year appointment as dean from July 2013 through June 2015.
The lectureship is supported by a multi-year grant from the Kavli Foundation of Oxnard, California, to bring prominent scientists to campus.
The Jim and Martie Bultman Student Center is located at 115 E. 12th St., at the center of the Hope campus between College and Columbia avenues along the former 12th Street. Graves Hall is located at 263 College Ave., between 10th and 12th streets.