Students honored at prestigious computing conference
Open gallery
After presenting research alongside computer science professors, PhD candidates, and researchers from IBM, Lewis & Clark students earned one of two poster awards at an international conference on high-performance computing.
John Sibandze ’15, Samuel Kelly BA ’14, Christian Dicker BA ’14, Sam Dodson BA ’13, and Danielle Fenske BA ’14 won honorable mention for their poster titled “Viability of Parallel Prefix for Sequence Alignment on Massively Parallel Graphics Processing Units.”
Using modern graphics processing units (GPUs) with hundreds of simple processors, the students reexamined a decade-old parallel algorithm. They found that in some cases the algorithm didn’t apply to GPUs, key components for efficient energy use in the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Professor of Computer Science Jens Mache provided the inspiration and fuel for the project. In a fall 2013 parallelism course, Mache introduced the students to parallel computing. With funding from Lewis & Clark’s John S. Rogers Science Research Program, they conducted summer research with Mache.
“The professors at Lewis & Clark encourage students to go beyond lectures and to explore new pathways that they find interesting,” Kelly said. “I have often been surprised at the groundbreaking work happening here—in the sciences and beyond—as well as the level to which students take initiative in their own education.”
Caleb Diehl ’16 contributed to this story.
