Kennedy to speak at Jan. 30 University Professor Lecture

Kennedy to speak at Jan. 30 University Professor Lecture
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University Professor
Ken Kennedy will present “Increasing Productivity in
Computational Problem Solving” as the second lecture
in the University Professor Lecture Series Jan. 30.

Kennedy, also
the Ann and John Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering
and director of the Center for High Performance Software
Research, wrote in his lecture abstract that although the
speed of computing hardware has increased exponentially
over the past three decades, programming productivity has
increased only modestly.

As a result,
human costs have become the dominating factor limiting progress
in the use of computation to help solve important problems
facing the nation and the world.

At the same time,
increases in the complexity of both computers and applications
are making software development so difficult that it is
almost exclusively the domain of highly trained professionals.
When combined with the shortage of programmers at the highest
skill levels, this has created a “software gap”
between the demand for new software and the ability of the
world’s workforce to deliver it.

Kennedy’s
lecture will describe an emerging research effort at Rice
that promises to bridge that gap by making it possible for
ordinary users, particularly scientists and engineers, to
build their own high-performance applications.

If this effort
succeeds, it will facilitate a dramatic broadening of the
community that can use high-performance computing platforms
for problem solving, wrote Kennedy.

The lecture,
sponsored by the George R. Brown School of Engineering and
the Office of the Provost, will be at 4 p.m. in McMurtry
Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall. A reception in
Martel Hall will follow the talk.