Nicolas Dubé

Université Laval

Entering the Massive Multi-Processing Age: Implications for the Software Engineer

Multi-cores, Multi-sockets, multi-boards: as supercomputing technology comes to the desktop, how does it affect software developers everyday life? This talk will present recent hardware paradigm shifts and trends to come. It will discuss the many shortcomings now unavoidable relating to inter-processor communications, memory bandwidth, interconnect and disk storage. Adding to the widening performance gap between components, the aggregated system complexity makes efficient parallel programming even harder. Various librairies and utilities trying to address these shortcomings from the multi-core desktop to the worldwide Grid will therefore be presented. The talk will conclude outlining best practices in the design, developement and debugging of parallel programs.

Biography

Nicolas Dube is an Assistant Professor and Ph.D. Candidate at Universite Laval. He has taught Software Engineering courses and is currently outlining a new curriculum for Operating Systems, Networking and High Performance Computing.

As an active member of TECC (Technical Experts of Compute Canada) and CLUMEQ (Consortium Laval, UQAM, McGill, Eastern Québec), he has been involved in the recently approved National Platforms Fund proposal to CFI for High Performance Computing. Nicolas is now working on the implementation of CLUMEQ's share of that proposal.

He also works as a Software Engineering consultant for many niche industries and shares this experience in his courses to complement the academic content.

Nicolas research interests involve High Performance Computing, Supercomputers, Grids, Networking, OSs and Security. His thesis investigates economic models for compute cycles, brokering algorithms and software infrastructure to foster a reliable Grid Economy.

He is a FQRNT fellow and a two time recipient of the Hydro-Québec Ph.D. excellence fellowship.