Shannon I. Steinfadt

News and Info Page

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NVIDIA Professor Partnership Program

NVIDIA welcomed us into their Professor Partnership Program. We received two NVIDIA Tesla C870 parallel accelerator boards worth $3000 and two GeForce 8800 GT cards, and GeForce 8900 GT card through NVIDIA’s Professor Partnership program (with professors Johnnie W. Baker, Ye Zhao, Paul Farrell, and Arden Ruttan).

ClearSpeed Parallel Accelerator Research

We have a current and ongoing relationship with ClearSpeed. The Associative Computing Lab and the Real-Time Parallel Research groups are working closely with ClearSpeed to develop radar-processing and air-traffic control algorithms that use concepts of the Associative Computing Model. My research focus is on sequence alignment and approximate string matching on the hardware using the Cn parallel programming language. In 2007, ClearSpeed donated a CSX620 parallel accelerator for the research group.

Ohio Board of Regents Equipment Grant

I worked with Dr. Baker for a local Ohio Board of Regents Equipment Grant. We received $4,627 from the grant to fund the purchase of the ClearSpeed software development toolkit and supporting server to house the ClearSpeed Advance X620 parallel acceleration board alongside the two NVIDIA C870 Tesla boards.

Doctoral Research Showcase at Super Computing 2008

During November 15-21, 2008, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis also known as SC'08, I presented a fifteen minute talk reviewing some of my Ph.D. research. The title is Harnessing Associative Computing for Sequence Alignment with Parallel Accelerators and the abstract is posted online. It was a quick, but great way to get my work out and have some nice follow-up discussions. The slides are avaible on the personal conference page.

A Busy Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing!

The 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC'08) was wonderful! In addition to volunteering as a Hopper, the research poster entitled GATOR and SWAMP: GPU Computing for Sequence Alignment was presented.

The Bird-of-a-Feather went well with the three wonderful and diverse women, Shannon Duvall (Elon University), Anne Weinberger Bracy (Intel), and Katarzyna Wac (University of Geneva). Together the four of us created a dynamic and wide-ranging panel of speakers dicussingThe ABC's for ABD's: Tips for Working Your Way Through Dissertation to Ph.D. The abstract is online, the slides and a daily log template are on the Wiki page, and there is a Facebook group. We still welcome your tips, tricks, and stories that helped or are helping you out on your Ph.D. path on both the Wiki and Facebook!

OCCBIO 2008 Plenary Session

On June 2-4, 2008, the Ohio Collaborative Conference on Bioinformatics (OCCBIO '08) was held in Toledo, Ohio. This productive conference is always a pleasure to attend and interact with people. My research was chosen for a presentation during a plenary session. Handouts for GPU Computing for the SWAMP Sequence Alignment are a 2-up PDF.

IPDPS 2008 - Paper Published

We recently published a paper entitled SWAMP: Smith- Waterman using Associative Massive Parallelism co-authored with Dr. Johnnie W. Baker at the 9th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing (PDSEC). The workshop was held in conjunction with IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium held in Miami, FL April 14-18, 2008. Presentation slides.

IPDPS - Inaugural Doctoral Forum / Travel Grant

Ph.D. candidates Shannon I. Steinfadt and Wittaya Chantamas were selected to participate in the inaugural TCPP PhD Forum held at the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS '08) 2008. The poster session had less than a 50% acceptance rate.

Shannon was awarded a Travel Grant from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) to attend the International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium. Funding to the TCPP was made available through NSF support.

Poster Winner at Kent State Computer Science Open House - Industry Category

A poster Massively Parallel Sequence Alignment for the Bioinformatics Domain was presented won 1st place in the Business / Industry Category during the 2008 Department of Computer Science 3rd annual Open House and Poster Conference.

Community Outreach - Encouraging Tech for the Future Generations

A series of invited hands-on guest lectures were given to four different groups of gifted students in the fifth grade attending the Berea City School District in Ohio.  The lectures encouraged Computational Thinking, including computing, computer science and engineering, binary numbers, circuits, algorithms, software, and hardware, among many other topics.  Students helped to build circuits and had access to computer parts (motherboard, memory, processor, etc.) that they partially assembled. The article entitled "Computational Thinking" authored by Henderson, P. B., Cortina, T. J., and Wing, J. M. 2007. SIGCSE Bull. 39, 1 (Mar. 2007), 195-196. and Dr. Jeannette M. Wing's talk at IPDPS 2008 were the motivating factors that led to the talks.

 

©2006-2008 Shannon I. Steinfadt