Presenter

Jakub Kurzak earned his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Houston in Texas. Dr. Kurzak is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee’s Innovative Computing Laboratory. His research interests focus on high-performance computing (HPC) with particular interest in multi-core processors and hardware accelerators. He has over a decade of experience developing numerical software for large-scale supercomputers, including experience with distributed memory programming using message passing (MPI), programming multi-core processors using different forms of multithreading (Pthreads, OpenMP), and programming hardware accelerators (mostly NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA). He published over 80 journal and conference papers and is a co-editor of the book Scientific Computing with Multicore and Accelerators (with Jack Dongarra and David Bader).

Currently, Dr. Kurzak provides technical leadership for the Software for Linear Algebra Targeting Exascale (SLATE) project, which is part of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP). The objective of SLATE is to replace the venerable Scalable Linear Algebra PACKage (ScaLAPACK), which has become the industry standard for dense linear algebra operations in distributed memory environments. However, after two decades of operation, ScaLAPACK is past the end of its lifecycle and overdue for a replacement, as it can hardly be retrofitted to support hardware accelerators, which are an integral part of today's HPC hardware infrastructure.