UD’s Chandrasekaran honored for excellence in high performance computing

Sunita Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Delaware, has won a 2016 IEEE-CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing.

She is one of just three winners nationwide and the only one affiliated with an academic institution. The other two awardees, Kyle Chard and Seyong Lee, are associated with national laboratories.

The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of high-performance computing within five years of receiving their doctoral degrees.

Chandrasekaran’s research interests include programming accelerators (GPUs), exploring the suitability of high-level parallel programming models such as OpenMP and OpenACC for current and future platforms, and validating and verifying emerging directive-based parallel programming models.

She led a GPU hackathon at UD earlier this year in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Lab aimed at preparing coders to tap into the power of supercomputer Titan, and she is now directing the University’s NVIDIA GPU Education Center. In addition, she will be leading a project on high-performance computing through UD’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program in spring 2017.

Chandrasekaran received her doctorate from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and joined the UD faculty in fall 2015.

“Sunita is very deserving of this award,” says Kathleen McCoy, chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. “She brings tremendous enthusiasm to her teaching, and she is forging valuable collaborations with researchers at national labs and in industry.”

Chandrasekaran received the award at the SC16 conference, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from Nov. 13-18. SC16 drew some 12,000 participants, including a number of UD students.

“Two of our students were chosen for the HPC for Undergraduates Program, and several others were chosen as volunteers for the conference,” she says. “It’s extremely competitive for the students to get through such programs, so we’re very proud that our students got through these programs and were able to attend the conference.”

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