Mert Hidayetoğlu, a graduate of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (BS ’13, MS ’15) who is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named one of two 2021 recipients of the ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focuses on areas including high-performance computing and large-scale data analysis.
Mr. Hidayetoğlu was recognized for contributions in scalable sparse applications using fast algorithms and hierarchical communication on supercomputers with multi-GPU nodes.
Sparse operations are the main computational workload for numerous scientific, AI and graph-analytics applications. Most of the time, the costs of computation and communication for distributed sparse operations constitute an overall performance bottleneck.
Mr. Hidayetoğlu’s research investigates this bottleneck at two specific points: memory accesses and communications. He has proposed and demonstrated two novel techniques to improve performance – sparse matrix tiling and hierarchical communications – and has successfully demonstrated these techniques in award-winning applications, including large-scale X-ray imaging at Argonne National Laboratory and accelerated sparse deep neural network inference at IBM Research.