IAS Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professor Public Lecture 8 July 2025

"An Overview of High Performance Computing and Responsibly Reckless Algorithms"

In this talk, we examine how high-performance computing has changed over the last 10 years and look at trends in the future. These changes have had and will continue to impact our software significantly.  Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile-time and run-time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run--time environment variability will make these problems much harder. 

Mixed precision numerical methods are paramount for increasing the throughput of traditional and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads beyond riding the wave of the hardware alone. Reducing precision comes at the price of trading away some accuracy for performance (reckless behavior) but in noncritical segments of the workflow (responsible behavior) so that the accuracy requirements of the application can still be satisfied.

About the speaker [More info]: Prof Jack Dongarra specialises in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. He holds appointments at the University of Manchester, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Tennessee.

In 2019 he received the ACM/SIAM Computational Science and Engineering Prize. In 2020 he received the IEEE-CS Computer Pioneer Award. In 2021 he received the ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and software that have driven decades of extraordinary progress in computing performance and applications.  He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM; a foreign member of the British Royal Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.