Ph.D. Student Receives Best Paper Award

Computer Science Doctoral candidate Alicia Thorsen, Assistant Professor Phil Merkey, and Professor Fredrik Manne from the University of Bergen, Norway received the Best Paper Award for their paper, “Maximum Weighted Matching Using the Partitioned Global Address Space Model”, at the High Performance Computing and Simulation Symposium (HPC 2009) March 23-25 in San Diego, California. Alicia presented the paper at the conference.

The paper described the design and implementation of an algorithm for the weighted matching graph processing problem. The algorithm was expressed in the new programming language, UPC. UPC is based on C and expresses parallel computations using a partitioned global address space. Languages such as UPC are being developed to make programming the coming generation of peta-scale supercomputers easier and more reliable. The UPC implementation developed is much simpler than a similar implementation using MPI, which is currently the most common way to express algorithms for parallel systems.