CGrADS Site Visit Participant - Lennart Johnsson

Professional Preparation

Lennart Johnsson
Department of Computer Science
The University of Houston

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Appointments:

• Director, Texas Learning and Computation Center, University of Houston, 1999 -
• Member, Executive Committee, W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology, 1999 -
• Member, Executive Committee, the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute, 1999 -
• Chair, The Swedish National Allocations Committee for High Performance Computation, The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research, Stockholm, Sweden, 1999 -
• Chair, The External Advisory Board, the National High Performance Computation and Visualization Center, PDC, Stockholm, Sweden, 1999 -
• University of Houston Internet2 representative, 1997 -
• Chair, Department of Computer Science, University of Houston, 1996 - 1999
• Chair, Scientific Board, the National High Performance Computation and Visualization Center, PDC, Stockholm, Sweden, 1996 - 1999
• Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, 1995 -
• Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 1995 -
• Visiting Professor, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Sciences, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 1995 -
• Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science, Harvard University, 1990 - 1996
• Director, Computational Sciences, Thinking Machines Corp., Cambridge, MA, 1987 - 1995
• Associate Professor of Computer Science, and of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, 1983 - 1990
• Senior Research Associate, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 1979 - 1983
• Manager, Systems Engineering, Central Research-&-Development, ASEA AB (now ABB), 1974 - 1980
• Systems Engineer, Central Research-&-Development, ASEA AB (now ABB), 1970 - 1974
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Systems Science Department, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 1970 - 1971

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Synergistic Activities

At ASEA AB (now ABB), Dr. Johnsson implemented one of the first commercial-strength sparse-matrix packages, and led the development of systems for real-time supervision, control, and optimization of electric utility network operations, and for industrial process control. Within five years after entering the market for control centers for electric utilities, ASEA AB was a world leader with a revenue of about $50M (1987 dollars) for this product area and over 200 people engaged.

In 1982 at Caltech Dr Johnsson in collaboration with Dr Fornberg of the Applied Mathematics Dept. introduced one of the first courses in the country on large-scale scientific and engineering computation on scalable parallel architectures. Revisions of this course was later introduced by Dr Johnsson at Yale University (1983) and Harvard University (1990). At Yale University, both faculty and graduate students attended the course the first time it was taught. It was one of very few courses related to parallel architectures, their programming and use. At the University of Houston Dr Johnsson has also introduced a course on Advanced Networking addressing issues n the design and use of high-performance networks.

Some of the results of Dr Johnsson’s research on network routing influenced the definition of the primitives in the MPI standard, and were adopted by vendors such as Intel and IBM in implementing the standard, and heavily influenced the Connection Machine Run-Time System.

At Thinking Machines Corp., Dr. Johnsson lead the design, development, and maintenance of the Connection Machine Scientific Software Library (CMSSL) and part of the Connection Machine Run-Time System (CMRTS). The CMSSL included several novel features, such as algorithm selection at run-time, and multiple-instance functionality for consistency with languages with array syntax.

Jointly with Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine Dr Johnsson established the Texas GigaPoP and was responsible for the first MPI applications for Globus demonstrated at SC97. He also lead the eDort at two of five institutions performing an interactive, collaborative VR demonstration at Alliance ’98 resulting in permanent Nordunet connectivity to the Abilene and vBNS networks and significantly increased Nordunet transatlantic capacity (from 34 Mbps to three OC-3 connections and doubled to six OC-3 connections this year). Johnsson has also actively contributed to establishing the European Grid Forum.

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Related Publications:

1. Ken Kennedy, Bradley Broom, Keith Cooper, Jack Dongarra, Rob Fowler, Dennis Gannon, Lennart Johnsson, John Mellor-Crummy and Linda Torczon, “Telescoping Languages,” submitted to the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.
2. Y. Charlie Hu, G. Jin, L. Johnsson, D. Kehagias and N. Shalaby, “HPFBench: A High Performance Fortran Benchmark Suite,” ACM Transaction on Mathematical Software, 26(1), pp. , 2000.
3. Michael Feig, Matin Abdullah, Lennart Johnsson and Montgomery Pettitt, “Large Scale Data Repository: Design of a Molecular Dynamics Trajectory Database,” Future Generation Computer Systems, Elsevier, North- Holland, 16(1), pp. 101 - 110, 1999.
4. Kapil K. Mathur and Lennart Johnsson, “High Performance, Scalable Scientific Software Libraries,” in Portability and Performance in Parallel Processing, John Wiley & Sons, pp. 159-208, 1994.
5. CMSSL, The Connection Machine Scientific Software Library, Thinking Machines Corp., 1986 - 1995.

Other Significant Publications and Patents:

1. Yu Charlie Hu, Shang-Hua Teng and Lennart Johnsson, “High Performance Fortran for Highly Irregular Problems,” in Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, ACM Press, pp 13-24, 1997.
2. Yu Hu and Lennart Johnsson, “Implementing N-body algorithms eIciently in data parallel languages,” Journal of Scientific Programming, 5(4), pp. 337-364, 1996.
3. Zdenek Johan, Kapil K. Mathur, Lennart Johnsson and Thomas J.R. Hughes, “Scalability of Finite Element Applications on Distributed-Memory Parallel Computers,” Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 119(1-2), pp. 61-72, November 1994.
4. Lennart Johnsson, “Data Partitioning for Load-Balance and Communication Bandwidth Preservation,” Proceedings of The Second International Conference on Massively Parallel Processing using Optical Interconnections, IEEE Computer Soc. Press, pp. 214-219, 1995.
5. Ted Nesson and S. Lennart Johnsson, “ROMM Routing on Mesh and Torus Networks,” Proc. of the 7th Annual ACM Symp. on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, ACM Press, 1995, pp. 275-287.

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Collaborators:

Current Collaborators: Ralph Brickner (LANL/Darwin), Jean-Philippe Brunet (SUN), Barbara Chapman (UH), Wah Chiu (Baylor), Bjrn Engquist (UCLA), Michael Feig (Scripps), Ian Foster (ANL), Roland Glowinski (UH), Thomas Hughes (Stanford), Zdenek Johan (ONERA), Ken Kennedy (Rice), Carl Kesselman (USC/ISI), David Kramer (Oracle), Yuri Kuznetsov (UH), Bowen Loftin (UH), Kapil Mathur (D.E. Shaw), Montgomery Pettitt (UH), Ridgway Scott (Univ of Chicago), Jaspal Subhlok (UH), Paul Swarztrauber (NCAR), and Shang-Hua Teng (UIUC).

Recent Advisees and Postdoctoral Scholars: Ching-Tien Ho (IBM Almaden), Yu Charlie Hu (Rice), Olle Larsson (ANL), Ted Nesson (VideoGuide), Abhiram Ranade (formerly UCBer keley), Nadia Shalaby, and Manish K Singh (Lucent). Dr Johnsson is currently supervising 10 graduate students and two Research Associates.

Thesis Advisor: Birger Qvarnstrm

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