University of Illinois computer science Ph.D. student Abhinav Bhatele was one of two recipients of the George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellows for 2009.

Bhatele, a 5th year graduate student in the computer science program, was chosen for the George Michael Memorial award based on his research excellence, academic progress, and other criteria that shows his potential to enhance high performance computing. The award provides a monetary stipend for educational expenses and travel expenses for Bhatele to attend SC'10 in New Orleans to provide a status of his research.

Bhatele's doctoral research is on automating the mapping and load balancing of parallel applications considering the interconnect topology of parallel machines. The goal is to minimize network contention by co-locating communicating tasks or objects on nearby physical processors. This work is especially important on 3D mesh interconnects such as IBM Blue Gene and Cray XT machines. This research is independent of the parallel programming model and hence useful for MPI, Charm++ and other applications.  Bhatele conducts his research in Professor Laxmikant Kale’s Parallel Programming Laboratory.

The George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellow award was established by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the IEEE Computer Society, and SC Conference series. It is awarded annually and provides a stipend for up to three fellowship recipients for one academic year, plus travel support to attend the next year's SC conference.

"The George Michael HPC Fellowship Program is designed to directly address this recommendation by honoring exceptional Ph.D. students throughout the world with the focus areas of high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis," wrote William Kramer (pictured above with Abhinav Bhatele and other 2009 recipient), Deputy Director of the Blue Waters Project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.