During Oct. 19-21 2016, Professor James Demmel visited CCMA and gave three lectures as the CCMA Distinguished Lecture Series, which are aimed at broadening the educational and research experiences of Penn State students and research community by bringing distinguished researchers to campus to give a sequence of lectures on forefront research topics in theoretical computational and applied mathematics. Professor Demmel holds the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999, a fellow of the IEEE in 2001, a fellow of SIAM in 2009, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2011, and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.
Professor Demmel focused on the communication-avoiding (CA) algorithms for linear algebra in his three lectures: The first lecture (11:10-12:00 Oct. 19) was about the lower bound used to describe each parallel algorithm and introduced several algorithms; The second lecture (4:00-5:00 Oct. 19) discussed more details on SUMMA, 2.5D Matmul, tensor contraction, TSQR, TSLU, and other iterative methods; The third lecture (11:10 am — 12:00 Oct. 20) presented more theories behind each algorithm including lower bound proof for direct linear algebra using Loomis-Whitney, Holder-Brascamp-Lieb linear program and other related theories. On Oct. 21, a mini-workshop was held to interact with Professor Demmel. Professors Ludmil Zikatanov, James Brannick, Kamesh Madduri and Jinchao Xu presented some latest results of their own researches. Undergraduates, graduates, and other professors were involved in these activities.
