CS Interests

Distributed computing, Optimization, Software design

The short story

I've been working with parallel computing for a few years now, both as a student, and as an employee at our national Center For Education and Supercomputing. It has become one of my major interests. In particular, I find distributed computing, eg. computing done on massively parallel machines, or clusters interesting, because it enables almost everyone to perform computations which were formerly only possible on very expensive supercomputers.

Beowulf technology is the short term for ``clusters of commodity hardware based computers in a network''. Programmed properly, it is possible to achieve supercomputer performance on these clusters for approx. one tenth of the price of a comparable dedicated supercomputer. I find that pretty cute.

Thus, if one can parallelize some computation allowing it to run on a distributed system instead of running on a single or symmetric multiprocessor or vector processor machine, it will enable people to get much more work done for a lot less money.

My current interests, optimization, distributed programming, algorithms, and numerics in general, are of course an outcome of the above.

The interest for software design is something I've picked up along the way, during the last six years or so. Designing software the right way is an art. Just like architecture (yes, the drawing-buildings-on-paper-thing) often is.

It's a common misconception,
that programming has anything to do
with computer science.