CS Undergraduate Adnan Haider Wins Gold in ACM Student Research Competition

Adnan Haider (CS 2nd year) won first place (gold) for undergraduate research at a recent ACM/IEEE high-performance computing conference.

Haider’s research, “Lessons from Post-Processing Climate Data on Modern Flash-Based HPC Systems,” was selected as the best of all undergraduate research presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC15), held November 15-20 in Austin, Texas. The SC conference is the largest and most prestigious in high-end computing. This year’s event attracted more than 12,000 people.

Haider addressed how the latest supercomputers differ in performance when running post-processing climate data software. The ideas from this research can be applied to accelerate the speed of many other scientific applications that are integral for expanding scientific frontiers. His advisor was Xian-He Sun, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and his supervisors were Sheri Mickelson and John Dennis of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Haider beat out research by undergraduates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California-Berkeley, Rice University, William and Mary, and many other institutions with his work. He will now advance to compete with nine other first-place winners from other disciplines in the final ACM Student Research Competition.

After working with Sun’s research group for more than a year, Haider has published three papers in 2015. A paper on which he was the second author received the best paper award at the 29th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation in London in June.