- Contact Info - Sched./Calendar - Short Bio - Teaching

Dr. Anne C. Elster Assoc. Prof. of Computer and Info. Science , Founder and leader of IDI/NTNU's HPC-Lab, Visiting Scientist, ECE, Univ. of Texas at Austin, and Co-Founder & Co-Director of NTNU's Computational Science and Visualization Program Senior Member of IEEE since 2000. - My Research Lab incl. - Grad students and HPC-lab members - CV pdf incl. Publications and Talks - Cristin regs , Google Scholar - Professional Activities - Media Articles and Interviews

Ph.D. EE Cornell University (1994) (Minor: Computer Science M.S. EE ' Cornell University (1988) B.S. Univ. of Massachusetts (1985) Computer Systems Engineering (cum laude). Also enrolled in their Honors Math program. Business studies at Univ. of Oregon (1981-82)

---

Current PhD students: (images are clickable)

Current Master students:

Recent PhDs:

---

Lastest news:

• Two PhD positions and a Post Doc positions for NTNU's "CSE Light House" are announced with deadline March 20, 2013 Two of these positions will be connected to my HPC-Lab. See http://www.jobbnorge.no/job.aspx?jobid=91040 for details. All applications have to be submitted through jobbnorge.no

• I will be giving two talks at the GTC 2013 Conference: Link to my presentations

• I will be serving on SC'13 Panels and Workshop Committees , as well as on the Program Committes for ISC'13 and ParCo 2013. See CV and below for other activities.
• My PhD student Jan Christian Meyer defended his dissertation on his birthday Dec 2012! Link to more info
• My Hpc-Lab and NTNU is now a CUDA Research Center as well as a CUDA Teaching Center!
• Samira Pakdel joined my research group this Fall. She is applying for PhD candidacy.
• My HPC-lab featured in digi.no: http://www.digi.no/902742/dette-skal-norges-storste-supermaskin-gjore
• Thomas L. Falch joined HPC-Lab as a PhD student in July 2012. He is working on the Medical Computational and Visualization project Elster has with Drs. Frank Lindseth and Trond Kvamsdal.
• Received Statoil grant for my PhD student Ivar Ursin Nikolaisen starting March 2012 with Dr. Alf B. Rustad, Statoil Research as co-advisor.
• My HPC-LAB has received NOK 1. Million for equipment from NTNU/IME for 2012.
• PhD student Grant Strong from Memorial University, Canada, visited my HPC-Lab for the spring 2012 semester.

NOTE: I generally have no summer stipends available since I travel a lot during summers!

---

Research: (see also the webpage for my HPC-Lab

Software Frameworks for Heterogeneous and Parallel Computing incl. GPGPU, Cluster & Grid Technologies.
HPC applications incl. Medical Imaging and Oil & Gass Simulations

• Research collaborations with: ARM, CERN (CERN Summer jobs and MS theses), GE Healthcare, Schlumberger, Statoil, as well as with colleagues from other NTNU Departments.
• Funding sources: NFR, NOTUR, NTNU, NVIDIA -- Elster is PI of NTNU's CUDA Research & Teching Centers, Statoil, Schlumberger and others.

Currently advising 5+ PhD and 9 master students: -- Grad students and HPC-lab members

I have so far been main advisor for 48 master students. Their theses are available through NTNU's DAIM system here

An older summary with links is here.

Current PhD students: Rune E. Jensen (Elster main advisor, to defend in 2013/14) Ivar U. Nikolaisen (Elster main advisor, co advisor: Alf B. Rustad, Statoil) Thomas L. Falch (MS w/ Elster, joined PhD prog 2012) (Elster main advisor, MS w/ Elster, joined PhD prog 2012) Samira Pakdel (MS from Malaysia, joined PhD prog 2012) (MS from Malaysia, joined PhD prog 2012) Lane Holloway (defacto co-advisor at UT Austin, proposal defense scheduled March 2013) Mehdi Bozorgi (co-advisor) (co-advisor with Dr. Frank Lindseth) Erik Smistad (co-advisor with Dr. Frank Lindseth) NN -- currently advertizing for one at least more PhD student -- see above

Graduated PhDs/ evaluations/other PhD supervisions: Thorvald Natvig (Elster main advisor, defended in 2010) Jan C. Meyer (Elster main advisor, defended Dec 10, 2012) Cyril Banino-Rokones -- supervised by Elster 2003-2006, PhD 2007 w. Dr. Lasse Natvig as main advisor. Jochen Rau (Medical Technology, NTNU) (3rd opponent) to defend in April 2013 Michele Martone (PhD Universitá degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata", Facoltá di Ingegneria, defense May 31, 2011), (external EU evaluator) Yong Liu (PhD Dept. of Informatics, Univ. of Tromsø, defended Feb 24, 2011) (2nd Opponent) Jo Skjermo (PhD 2009), Main advisor: Prof. Keith Downing, Anne C. Elster (3 rd opponent). Nicolae-Zoran Constantinescu-Fülöps ( PhD 2008) Prof. Richard Blake (main advisor), Anne C. Elster (3 rd opponent) Roxana Diaconescu (PhD 2002), Prof. Reidar Conradi (main advisor), Prof. Monica Lam (Stanford, 1st opponent), Anne C. Elster (3 rd opponent) Penti Huttunen(PhD ECE at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, Dec. 2002) Advisor: Dr. Jari Porras, 1st Opponenent: Dr. Kimmo Koski, Nokia (now CSC Director), 2nd Opponent: Anne C. Elster

Current Master Students (Estimated graduation date) Henrik H. Knutsen -- M.Tech. (Dec 2013) Lars Kirkholt Melhus -- M.Tech. (Summer 2013) Magnus Alvestad Mikalsen -- M.Tech. (Summer 2013) Andreas Nordahl -- M.Tech. (Summer 2013) Lars Espen Strand Nordhus -- M.Tech. (Summer 2013) Stian Aaraas Pedersen -- M.Tech. (Summer 2013) Lars Martin Petersen -- M.Tech (Dec 2013) Andreas Skomedal --M.Tech. (Summer 2013) Elisabeth Solheim -- M.Sci. (Dec 2013)

Post Docs Ian Karlin (PhD U of Colorado, Boulder 2011) (May 2011-Dec 2012) Ian was supposed to be with my group until May 2012, but we ran into visa problems re. his wife, so he, unfortunately, left early. He did participate at both NORDUNET 2011 and SC 2011 on behalf of my group. Jan Perhac (April 2010-April 2011) (ERCIM) Jan was an active participant in my research group. He helped with the THOR project which we did with HPC-Lab visitor Jose Louis VasquezPoletti, from UCM, Spain. John Ryan (2010) John worked on heterogeneous cluster issues. He was supposed to stay longer, but decided to return to Ireland for a job there. Dr. Henrik R. Nagel (2005-2007) Henrik is currently at NTNU HPC Group at ITEA (Computing Center) His research focus is on using grid technology to integrate visualization and computations. Dr. Nagel also helped out with the organization of the SIMS 2005 conference that was held at NTNU in October 2005 and is the co-editor of its proceeding

Teaching

I have a passion for teaching. As can be seen below, I now teach two 3rd-year/4th year courses that are challenging, but very popular (> 50 students take then each semester in a dept with ca 100 students/year). Both courses have a heavy programming component which I feel strongly contributes to the success of these courses.

"Teaching Highlights" and more details re. my teaching can be found at link

Training: I have completed the PEDUP (PEDagogical Development Program put together for NTNU faculty. I joined this program in 2001/2002 which included a general part estimated to take 50 work-hours and two smaller modules which are estimated to take 25 hours each. I selected PBL (Problem-Based Learning) and "Teaching in Larger Groups" as these modules. A longer report was also submitted which is being reworked as aconference/journal teaching article.

• DT8117 Grid Technologies and Heterogeneous Computing Spring 2013, 2009 (taught by others in 2011 when on sabatical)
  PhD course focusing on current research topics in high-performance computing including many-core systems with GPUs, clusters, grids and clouds.
• TDT 4205 Compilers/Kompilatorteknikk ( Spring 2013, Spring 2012 67+ students attended!) Spring 2010) (Fall 2006-2008)
• TDT 24 Parallel Environments & Numerical Methods ( Fall 2009) (Fall 2006-2008, 2001-2003)
• TDT 4200 Parallel Computing (Fall 2012) (Fall 2011) (also Spring 2006-Fall 2009, 2003-2004)
• DIF 8916 -- Topics in Computer and Information Science (Spring 2001) -- PhD research techniques course
• SIF 8041 -- Operating Systems & Databases (Spring 2001)

Courses taught at Univ. of Texas at Austin, USA (ECE, CS and Math):

• EE 360 "Conference course" (indiv. lesepensum) on "Special Problems in Parallel Computing" (Spring 2002). Student admitted to Ms/PhD Program in CS at UIUC, USA
• Supervised EE 464H -- ECE Honors Student Project,(Summer 2001).
• EE 360P -- Operating Systems (Fall 2000)
• EE 360C -- Data Structures in C++ (CS7) (Summer 2000)
• CS/M 393N -- Numerical Solutions to Elliptic Partial Differential Equations (Spring 1999)
  -- a second level grad. course on iterative PDE methods (lectured for Dr. David M. Young)
• M 340L (Spring 1999) -- Linear Algebra for non-math majors. -- Assisted with exams and gave several guest lectures.
• CS 328 -- Abstract Data Types (CS7, incl. graph algorithms) (Summer 1998) -- taught in C++.
• CS 315 -- Data Structures (CS2)(Summer 1997) -- taught in C++.

Course taught through Acenor Inc.: Parallel numerical methods course for US Air Force's Research Lab at WPAFB, May 2000

Professional activities (highlights) See also CV

• Upcomming and Recent conferences
• Kronikk in Dagbladet (one of 3 main newspapers in Norway ), May 7, 2010, (main debate article contributions that was almost 2-pages in print-verion) "Forbigått av Kina og Saudi-Arabia" on why and how Norway should invest more in research and infrastructure. Well received and lead to meeting with policy makers.
• IDI Open 2010 (Elster has been the faculty sponsor of this annual event since 2007. ( 2008 and 2009: 60+ teams with 2-3 participants on each team!)
• NCPC Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (Elster is the National faculty sponsor for the Norwegian programming teams)
• NCPC 2008, Result summary and photos by Elster
• Working Group Leader (1 of 4) and MC Member, EU COST Action IC0805: Open European Network for High Performance Computing on Complex Environments (2009-present).
• Expert Panel on Reach Infrastructure, Danish Research Council EFI Link Budget: 600M DKr, (2007-2009)
• HPC Committee (TRP III), Research Council of Norway (2003-2004) -- Defined Norway's current National HPC program
• Committees 2011 include:
• IEEE IPDPS 2011 (Program Committee)
• ParCo'11 ( PC member)
• Committees 2010 include:
• IPDPS 2010 (Program Committe, Software)
• EuroGraphics 2010 (Program Committee, Short Papers)
• PARA 2010: (Steering committee and MS Organizer)
• CCP 2010 ( Local Committee , Session Chair , Invited talk )
• Cluster 2010 (Workshop co-organizer)
• HiPC 2010 (Program Commitee)
• Program Committees 2009 include:
• IEEE IPDPS 2009,
• ParCo'09,
• PPAM 2009,
• SC'09 (Technical Papers reviewer)
• Commitees 2008 include:
• PARA 2008 (General Chair and Co-organizer of two minisymposia -- 230+ attendees from 20+ countries; raised $$s in funding from several sources)
• SC'08 ( Co-Chair Poster Committee -- personally reviewed over 80 abstracts))
• Reviewer of journal papers for:
• IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing (2003-present),
• International Journal of HPCA,
• Comm. in Num. Methods in Engineering (CNME),
• Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC),
• SIAM Journal on Scientific and Statistical Computing (SISSC),
• Distributed Computing by Springer Verlag, as well as
• reviewer of technical papers, posters and tutorials for many international conferences.
• Member of:
• ACM
• IEEE (Senior Member since 2000)
• IEEE Computer Society
• IEEE Signal Processing Society
• SIAM (Life Member)
• AAAS
• AAUW
• AGU (Life Member)
• NFA
• NORSIG
• SIMS
• Tekna
• Founder of the NCSGSC (NTNU Comp. Sci. Grad. Student Conference) which has been held yearly ever since 2001.
• Commitee member MPI: The Message Passing Interfaces Forum -- international standards committee (1992-1997).
• More details including University Service: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~elster/doc/cv-acelster.pdf

Upcomming cand Recent Conferences and Meeetings:

2011

• Dr. Elster to give 50 minute invited talk at IMA workshop High Performance Computing and Emerging Architectures , January 10-14, 2011, University of Minnesota, USA
• Eurographics 2011, April 11-15, Ladudno, UK
• Short papers due Dec 10, 2010

(Elster will prob. not participate due to US sabattical)

• COST Action IC0805 Open Network for High-Performance Computing on Complex Environments" -- Spring School, May 9-13, 2011, Amsterdam, Netherland
• IPDPS 2011, May 16-20, Anchorage, Alaska (Elster is PC member, Applications) >
• Householder Symposium XVIII June 12-17, 2011, Granlibakken Conference Center & Lodge Tahoe City, California (Elster will not attend)
• ParCo 2011 , August 30-September 2, 2011, Ghent, Belgium (Elster is a PC member)
• PPAM 2011 , September 11-14, 2001, Torun, Poland (Elster inivted to be a PC member, but declined due to previous commitments)
• SC'11 , Nov. 12-18, Seattle, Wa, USA (Papers abstracts due April 1, 2011)

2010

• PPoPP 2010 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming January 9-14, 2010, Bangalore, India
  (Elster was invited to join the Program Committee, but had to decline due to prior commitments)
• IPDPS 2010 (24th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, April 19-23, 2010 at Downtown Sheraton, Atlanta (Georgia) USA
  (Elster is on the Program Committee (Software))
• Dr. showcases due Dec 14
• EuroGraphics 2010 , May 3-5, Norrköping, Sweden
  (Elster is on the Program Committee (Short papers))
• Short, area and educational papers due Dec 11, 2009
• Posters due Feb 5, 2010
• CCGrid-10: The 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, May 17-20, Melbourne Australia.
• MMA 2010 15th International Conference on Mathematical Modelling and Ananlysis, May 26-29, Druskininkai, Lithuania,
• Abstracts due March 30, 2010.
• ICCS 2010: 2010 International Conference on Computational Science, May 31- June 2, 2010, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• Full paper submissions: Dec 20, 2009
• ISC10: Innternational Supercomputer Conference, May 31 - June 3, 2010, Hamburg, Germany.
• Full Papers due Jan 11, 2010
• BOFs and Posters due March 21, 2010
• PARA 2010: Conference on the State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing June 6-9, University of Iceland, Reykjavik.
  (Elster is on the Steering Committee and is organizing an MS on GPU computing - EuroGPU2010)
• Dec 15, 2009: Minisymposium tpics
• Feb 28, 2010: Abstracts
• Sep 1, 2010: Full Papers
• CCP 2010 (Conference on Computational Physics), June 23-26, 2010, Trondheim, Norway. 550+ attendee expected.
  (Elster is on the Local and National Committees)
• Cluster 2010 2010 IEEE International Confenrence on Cluster Computing, Sept 20-24, Heraklion, Creete, Greece.
  (As the WG Leader for EU COST IC0805 Elster is part of co-organizing a proposed workhop related to the action.)
• Abtracts due March 8, 2010
• SC'10, Nov. 2010 in New Orleans, Lousiana, USA
  (Elster will organize a large 20x30 stand for NTNU)
• HiPC 2010 -- 17th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Goa, India, Dec. 19-22. Sponsored by IEEE
  (Elster is on the Program Committee)

Recent conferences and interesting events:

2009

• IEEE IPDPS'09 (23rd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium) May 25-29, 2009, Rome, Italy.
  (Elster was on the Program Committee)
• MTAAP'09 Workshop on Multithreaded Architectures and Applications held in conjuction with IPDPS'09
  (Elster was co-author of two accepted papers that will be published in the IPDPS'09 proceedings)
• ISC'09 (International Supercomputing Conference) June 23-26, Hamburg, Germany
• IEEE IPDPS'09 (23rd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium) May 25-29, 2009, Rome, Italy.
  (Elster was on the Program Committee)
• ParCo'09, International Conference on Parallel Computing, Sept 1-4, Lyon, France.
  (Elster was on the Program Committee and co-organizer of the 2-day Minisymposium "EuroGPU")
• GAMM09 The 9th GAMM Workshop on Applied and Numerical Linear Algebra takes place at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Sep. 10-11, 2009.
  (Elster will unfortunately not be attending due to too many other commitments.)
• PPAM 2009, 8th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, Wroclaw (Poland), September 13-16, 2009
  (Elster was on the Program Committee and will be giving an invited paper on GPU Computing)
• Workshop on Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations on Surfaces , September 14 -- 17, 2009, Freiburg (Germany). This workshop is part of the program of the newly established SFB/Transregio 71 "Geometric partial differential equations" at the universities of Freiburg and Tubingen, which is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
  (Elster will unfortunately not be attending due to too many other commitments.)
• SIMS 50, Lyngby, Denmark, Oct 8-9
• NVIDIA workshop at NTNU, Monday Oct 24, 2009: Program
• COST Action IC0508 Management committee and working group meeting , October 19-20 2009, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portgual.
  (Elster is one of 4 WG leaders)
• SC'09 Portland, Oregon, USA, Nov 14-20. (Elster is on the Technical Program Committee)

2008

• MuCoCoS'08 (2008 Workshop on Multi-core Computing Systems), March 7, 2008, Barcelona as part of CISIS'08 March 4-7, 2008, Barcelona, Spain. (Elster's PhD student Jan Christian Meyer presented a joint paper with her)
• MRSC'08 ( Many-core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Conference) April 1-3, 2008, The Queen's University of Belfast, Nothern Ireland.
• SIAM Conference of Parallel Processing and Scientific Computing , March 12-14, 2008, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• IEEE IPDPS'08 <7a>(22nd IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium) , April 14-18, 2008, Miami, Florida
• Cray User Group (CUG 2008) , Helsinki, Finland
• PARA'08 May 13-16, 2008 in Trondheim, Norway
  (Organized and Chaired by Elster) . Over 230 attendees from ca. 30 countries.
• (CCGrid 2008) 8th International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, May 19-22, Lyon, France.
• Householder Symposium XVII , June 1-6, Zeuthen, Germany
• NOTUR 2008 , The 7th Annual Meeting on High Performance Computing and Infrastructure in Norway, June 3-5, Tromsø, Norway.
  (Elster presented posters with several of her students.)
• Euro-Par 2008 August 26-29, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
• SIMS 2008 , Oct 7-8, Oslo, Norway. (Elster was unfortunately too busy to make it this year... )
• The 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2008) Sept. 8-12, 2008, Portland, Oregon.
• SC'08 (Supercomputing), Nov.2007, Austin, TX, USA
  (Elster was Co-Chair of Poster Committee with Dr. Mootaz Elnozahy , IBM.)

2007

• Stanford 50: State of the Art and Future Directions of Computational Mathematics and Numerical Computing , March 29-31, 2007, Stanford, California, USA (Elster and her graduate student Leif Christian Larsen attended and presented a poster.)
• IEEE HPDC 2007 June 25-29, Monterey, California, USA (incl workshops June 25-26)
• The 13th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par) August 28-31, 2007, IRISA, Rennes, France.
• Workshop on Highly Parallel Processing on a Chip (HPPC) August 28, 2007, IRISA, Rennes, France (in conjunction w/ Euro-Par 2007)
  (Prof. Lasse Natvig from IDI on Program Commitee)
• IEEE Cluster 2007, Sept. 17-20, Austin, Texas, USA co-located with:
• HeteroPar'07 Sixth International Workshop on Algorithms, Models and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Networks, Sept. 17-21, 2007 , Austin, Texas, USA
• Grid 2007 -- The 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing, Sept. 19-21, Austin, Texas, USA
• ParCo 2007 Sept. 4-7, Jülich and Achen, Germany. (Elster attended as part of the Programming Committee)
• PPAM 2007) (Seventh International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics), Gdánsk, Poland
  (Elster presented invited paper on Scientific Computing on GPUs)
• SC'07 (Supercomputing), Nov. 10-16, 2007, Reno, Nevada, USA (Elster was a member of the SC'07 Tutorial Committee.)
• NIK 2007 (Norwegian computing conference), Nov. 19-21, 2007, Oslo, Norway (Elster was reviewer)
• NOTUR 2006 , May 11-12, Bergen, Norway (Elster and several students presented posters, incl. one receiving honorable mention)
• PARA'06 18-21 in Umeå, Sweden (Elster organized Minisyposium on HPC Visualization and Parallelization Tools with 12 speakers)

Older News:

• Dr. Elster was on sabattical at Univ. of Texas at Austin's ECE Department for the 2010/11 academic year.
• Gave invited talk at "International Symposium on Computer Simulations onGPU and other non-standard architectures", Germany, May 30-June 1, 2011
• 2 co-authored papers with HPC-Lab members accepted to IEEE IPDPS 2011 (HCW and MTAAP), Anchorage, Alaska, May 2011.
• Opponent at PhD defence at Dept of Computer Science, U of Tromsoe, Feb 24, 2011. Giving invited seminar talk there on the next day.
• Gave invited talk at IMA Workshop High Performance Computing and Emerging Architectures , January 10-14, 2011, Univ. of Minnesota, USA.
• My PhD student Thorvald Natvig defended his disertation on Dec 20, 2010. Profs. Brian Vinter(Copenhagen Univ.) and Otto Anshus (U of Tromsoe) as well as NTNU's Dr. Joern Amundsen were opponents.
• PC member of IEEE IPDPS 2011 (finished 12 paper reviews Nov/Dec 2010), as well as ParCo 2011, GHC'11 and SC'11 Tutorial Committee.
• Primary organizer og BoF on Towards Exa-Scale: Heterogeneous Clouds (CPUs, GPUs and Embedded Devices)", at SC'10 (with Jose Luis Vasquez-Poletti and Jan Perhac)
• My whole research group joined me at our SC'10 booth (NTNU no 1113)
• Gave invited talk on "Optimizing Codes for OpenCl and CUDA" at INFORMS 2010, Austin, TX, Nov.7, 2010.
• Organized Minisymposium on GPUs at PARA 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland
• Min Kronikk:"Forbigått av Kina og Saudi-Arabia: in Dagbladet , May 2010 (one of Norway's largest news papers);
• Received award plaque at CSGCS'10 banquet May 20 for being founder of the conference for our PhD students, now in its 10th year;
• Nominated by Dept. of Computer and Info. Science for Dean-level 2010 Teaching Award for excellent advising of Master students;
• Photos from IDI Open 2010 (Record attendance: 92 Teams, 250+students!) -- I was Co-Founder and Faculty Advisor 2007-2010
• Old Schedule

 

Other Interesting Links:

• Ideas on high-tech light rail at NTNU
• Acceptance and Attendance Statistics for many CS conferences published at UC Berkeley
• Check out the NTNU webcam . My college friend, Ginny Brown visited in May 2001 and took several great photos of Trondheim. My colleague, Prof. Roger Midstraum, also has several of his nice photos of Trondheim and NTNU on the web.
• Link to personal private homepage with (to me) useful links :-)

Leisure Interests:

• Ham Radio (N3ACE),
• Photography,
• Swimming,
• Tennis (USTA rating 3.0),
• Tropical Fish, and
• Voice (studied under Nadia Brown and Dr. Cynthia Karnstadt).

Personal stuff:

Dr. Elster's Academic Genealogy , hubby, Marie, hotlist, hobbies, photos from SC'05 in Seattle.

<hr