PARALLEL COMPUTING: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Speaker: Dr. Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar, Professor, Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick Fredericton, NB, Canada

Time: 2012/5/18 15:00

Location: East Main Building 8-301

Abstract: In parallel computing many calculations are carried out simultaneously. In parallel computers, the parallelism can exist at multiple levels: intra-instruction level, inter-instruction level, inter-task level and inter-job level.

Parallel processing has been used over many decades in computer systems to speed up computations, to provide fault tolerance and high availability. Parallel processing techniques have been fundamental in building high performance and super computers. Nowadays, such technologies are even present in laptop computers.

This talk gives an overview of the exciting history and the current state of parallel computing, with some predictions about the future developments. The speaker’s personal research experiences in this field over almost last four decades are also presented.

Bio: Virendrakumar (Virendra) C. Bhavsar received the B.Eng. (Electronics and Telecommunications) from University of Poona, India, and the M.Tech. (Electrical Eng.) and Ph.D. (Electrical Eng.) degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Dr. Bhavsar was a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 1974-83. Since 1983 he has been at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, where he is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science. He was the Dean of the Faculty during 2003-08. He is the founding Director of the Advanced Computational Research Laboratory that houses a high performance computing cluster serving the university and the region. He was also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Pune, India, 2008-09.

He co-led the bioinformatics component of the Canadian Potato Genomics project. He has been also involved in the Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet) – about $30 million high performance computing initiative in Atlantic Canada.

He has organized many national and international conferences/workshops. He was the Chair, IEEE New Brunswick Section, 1999-2002.

He has carried out research in the various facets of parallel computing since 1972. He has authored over 150 research papers in journals and conference proceedings and has edited three volumes. His current research interests include parallel and distributed processing, artificial intelligence applications in e-Business, e-Learning and bioinformatics, and the semantic web.