Professor Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, he is the Director of the Parallel Programming Laboratory. With a focus on enhancing performance and productivity via adaptive runtime systems, and with the belief that only interdisciplinary research involving multiple CSE and other applications can bring back well-honed abstractions into Computer Science that will have a long-term impact on the state-of-art, he has been working on various aspects of parallel computing, developing the "migratable objects" parallel programming model and its implementation in the Charm++ parallel programming system. In addition to the traditional HPC platforms, the adaptivity of this model is well-suited for cloud environments. His collaborations include the widely used Gordon-Bell award winning (SC'2002) biomolecular simulation program NAMD, and other collaborations on computational cosmology, quantum chemistry, rocket simulation, space-time meshes, and other unstructured mesh applications. He takes pride in his group's success in distributing and supporting software embodying his research ideas, including Charm++, Adaptive MPI and the BigSimframework. He and his team recently won the HPC Challenge award at Supercomputing 2011, for their entry based on Charm++. He received a B.Tech degree in Electronics Engineering from Benares Hindu University, Varanasi, India in 1977, and an M.E. degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, in 1979. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from State University of New York, Stony Brook in 1985. He worked as a scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research from 1979 to 1981. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in 1985. A fellow of the IEEE, he was a co-recipient with Klaus Schulten of the 2012 Sidney Fernbach Joint Award, "For outstanding contributions to the development of widely used parallel software for large biomolecular systems simulation". He was the Keynote speaker at the 5th Workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS) in 2012.