Computer Engineering PhD Student Wins ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship

Rohan Basu Roy, PhD’24, computer engineering, won the prestigious ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship for enhancing the productivity of computational scientists and environmental sustainability of high performance computing with novel methods and tools exploiting cloud computing and on-premise HPC resources.


This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Northeastern doctoral student Rohan Basu Roy works in EXP research center. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

Super computers run 40% faster thanks to award-winning tools developed by Northeastern doctoral student

In the fall of 2019, Rohan Basu Roy was sitting in the Goodwill Computing Laboratory on Northeastern’s Boston campus.

Headshot of Rohan Basu Ro.

Northeastern doctoral student Rohan Basu Roy is receiving the prestigious ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship. Roy designs new tools and methods for enhancing HPC programmer productivity and making large-scale computing systems more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

He had just started pursuing his doctorate in computer engineering and was working on high-performance computing (HPC) systems and applications. These systems sequence, analyze and extract large amount of data in a fraction of the time of a laptop or a regular desktop.

Scientists use these kinds of computers regularly to conduct research ranging from DNA sequencing and analyzing climate models to training large language models and tracking trends in the stock market.

Roy was using the HPC to run computational science applications that allowed him to do physics and chemistry simulations (think creating models of molecules, atoms, and other projects of that nature).

But what he quickly realized was that many of these simulations took days to complete.

“These applications were taking a long time to run on these HPC computers, and when I tried to port these applications into other computers, what was happening was that they were even slower,” he says.

So, Roy went to work creating performance tools designed to not only optimize the performance of these applications but also make them less resource intensive and more environmentally sustainable.

This week, Roy will accept the ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship at the SC Conference Award Ceremony in Denver in recognition of that effort. The award honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus areas are in high performance computing, networking, storage, and large-scale data analysis. He was honored for enhancing the productivity of computational scientists and environmental sustainability of high performance computing with novel methods and tools exploiting cloud computing and on-premise HPC resources.

Read full story at Northeastern Global News

Related Departments:Electrical & Computer Engineering