Professor V. Krishna Nandivada from IIT Madras won Cray’s Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam HPC Award – 2017

Chennai: Dr. V. Krishna Nandivada, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras, has been awarded with Cray’s Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam HPC Award (in the young researcher category) in recognition of his contributions towards High Performance Computing (HPC) field in India.

The award was presented on 8th April 2017 in New Delhi. The award selection was done by a jury headed by Prof. N. Balakrishnan, Professor of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Supercomputer Education Research Centre (SERC), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a Padma Shri awardee.

Professor V. Krishna Nandivada has developed many new analyses and optimizations to help efficient execution of task-parallel programs on HPC systems.

High Performance Computing (HPC) uses parallel processing for running advanced application programs in which several programs/tasks are run concurrently, instead of one after the other. This results in increased efficiency, reliability and speed.

“HPC is a crucial area that impacts wide variety of departments starting from biotechnology, physics, chemistry, geotechnology, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering and so on. Our group focuses on developing new analyses and optimization techniques to speed up HPC applications and in the process helping other sectors utilize this computing power to efficiently solve large computational problems,” says Dr. Krishna.

The priority areas in HPC, he says, are: encouraging more systems research, tools and application development, and educating students on building and using HPC applications. Dr. Krishna’s research has received funding from IBM, Department of Science and Technology (DST), and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) as well.