Phil Pratt-Szeliga successfully defended, in April 2010, his Master's Thesis Research, titled "Automatically Utilizing Graphics Processing Units from Java Bytecode".
His focus is to support scientific programming that uses Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to speedup computationally intensive processing segments of the code.
Using GPUs effectively requires very detailed knowledge of the GPU architecture, knowledge of a lot of processing maneuvers to share data between CPU and GPU
and to orchestrate the symbiotic operations required for this to work well. Phil's primarly goal is to allow a scientist to use the Java programming language
to describe all the details of his processing, then automatically transform the processing into the intricate cooperation required to use massively
parallel processing provided by GPUs to significantly speed up the program.
You will find a nice summary of this work in his defense slides and all the details in his thesis document, below:
While Phil was completing his Master's of Science degree he was admitted to a doctoral program in our department where he is continuing this research.
He has now successfully completed his Written Qualifying Exams, Oral Examination
on a relevant research paper, and his Disstertation Proposal Defense.