Menon to Receive George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship

7/21/2016 By Shanna DeSouza, CS @ ILLINOIS

CS grad student Harshitha Menon is a recipient of the 2014 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship.

Written by By Shanna DeSouza, CS @ ILLINOIS

CS grad student Harshitha Menon, a PhD candidate advised by CS Professor Laxmikant Kale, is a recipient of the 2014 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellowship. This fellowship honors exceptional PhD students around the world whose research focuses on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and large-scale data analysis. Fellowship winners are selected based on overall potential for research excellence and academic progress. The fellowship provides a $5,000 honorarium, and the award will be presented at the SC’14 Awards Ceremony.

Harshitha Menon
Harshitha Menon

“I am honored to receive this award.” said Harshitha. “It is a great opportunity to publicize my research work within the HPC community.”

Menon's research focuses on developing scalable load balancing algorithms and adaptive run time techniques to improve the performance of large scale dynamic applications. Her research covers performance optimizations of cosmology simulation application called ChaNGa, which is a collaborative research project between PPL and astrophysicists at University of Washington.

Laxmikant Kale
Laxmikant Kale

Also this year, Menon received the 2014 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. In 2012 she was selected as a Siebel Scholar.

“This award will be another prestigious feather in Harshitha’s cap!” said Kalé, director of the Parallel Programming Laboratory (PPL). “She has been doing excellent work in parallel computing, and I’m especially proud of her efforts in scaling ChaNGa, our computational cosmology application, up to 512K cores.”

This is the third year in a row that a PPL student is acknowledged for the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship award.

  • 2014: Harshitha Menon (PhD candidate)
  • 2013: Jonathan Lifflander (PhD candidate) and Edgar Solomonik (PPL alum)
  • 2012: Honorable Mention: Yanhua Sun (PhD candidate)
  • 2009: Abhinav Bhatele (PhD Graduate)

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This story was published July 21, 2016.