Solving Big Problems with Little Numbers

Dr. Hatem Ltaief, KAUST

Wednesday, December 11, 2024, 3:00-3:40 pm UTC (30 min talk + 10 min questions)
7 am PST / 9 am CST / 10 am EST / 3 pm UTC / 4 pm CET / 12 am JST
Participation is free, but registration is required
Registration link: siam.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Tgb2dUwqRUeiQ0r7tUriqA

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Abstract:

The future of simulations lies in leveraging hardware features designed for the AI market, particularly in low-precision computations. Modern NVIDIA GPUs exemplify this trend, offering significant performance gains through low-precision computations, resulting in reduced elapsed time, smaller memory footprints, and energy savings. We harness these capabilities to develop fast mixed-precision linear algebra algorithms. Our adaptive precision conversion strategy dynamically adjusts computation accuracy, maintaining high precision only where necessary within the matrix operator, while still meeting application-worthy precision requirements. This talk will illustrate how these algorithms revolutionize computational efficiency for geospatial statisticians, bioinformaticians, and geophysicists, having significant implications for environmental computational statistics, genome-wide association studies in computational biology, and seismic imaging for CO2 sequestration.

Bio:

Hatem holds the position of Principal Research Scientist at KAUST where he is also advising several KAUST students in their MS and PhD research. His research interests include parallel numerical algorithms. parallel programming models, mixed-precision computations, low-rank matrix approximations, performance optimizations for manycore architectures, and high performance computing. He has contributed to the integration of numerical algorithms into mainstream vendors' scientific libraries such as NVIDIA cuBLAS and HPE/Cray LibSci. He has been collaborating with domain scientists, i.e., astronomers, statisticians, computational chemists, bioinformaticians, and geophysicists on leveraging their applications to meet the challenges at exascale. He received best paper awards at EuroPar, ACM PASC, and IEEE ISC conferences. He was an ACM Gordon Bell Finalist (shared) in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and an ACM Gordon Bell Finalist for climate modeling (shared) in 2024.

Hatem Ltaief, KAUST