On Monday October 27, Ben van Werkhoven of COMMIT/project IV-e, successfully defended his dissertation titled 'Scientific Supercomputing with Graphics Processing Units' at the VU University Amsterdam and was awarded the degree of Doctor.

Ben van Werkhoven's dissertation focuses on the challenges that arise when applying Graphics Processing Units to Supercomputing applications. Under the supervision of promotor Prof. Henri Bal and co-promotors Frank Seinstra and Jason Maassen, Ben has contributed to several different areas including high-level programming models, optimization techniques, and performance models. His paper on Performance Models for CPU-GPU data transfers was nominated for best paper award at this year's CCGRID conference in Chicago, IL.

During his Phd project, Ben has also worked on a partial GPU implementation of the Parallel Ocean Program that is currently being used by Climate Scientists at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU) on the Dutch National Supercomputer Cartesius at SURFsara. Ben will continue working on this application within the Netherlands eScience Center as part of the eSALSA project.

The results of his research in high-level programming models and optimization techniques for Image Analysis will be applied to Digital Forensics as part of the project A Jungle Computing Approach to Large-Scale Online Forensic Analysis within the Netherlands eScience Center.

Ben's PhD Project was partially funded by the Dutch National Program COMMIT/.

IV-e (e-Infrastructure Virtualization for e-Science Applications)
Ook dit is een COMMIT/project.