Prof. Albert Y. Zomaya

School of Information Technologies
The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
zomaya@it.usyd.edu.au

Title: Exploring Biocomplexity - New Challenges for High Performance Computing

Abstract

The talk will address some of the key algorithmic and computational challenges associated with the modelling of certain classes of biological networks (e.g. biochemical, signalling). This will involve several research threads that cover a range of theoretical, software and hardware implementation issues. The theoretical modelling developments involve a variety of issues related to the numerical, probabilistic, logical, and symbolic aspects of computation and implementation. A lack of effective tools for modelling and analysing networks has prevented their use in many possible applications. The simulation tools will allow us to develop applications in which millions of randomly generated networks can be simulated and analyzed with great computational efficiency. This efficiency can be obtained by parallelizing the modelling process and address problems that arise from the increasing size of networks and the parallel computing systems that they will require. The problems will include, for example, the unpredictable workload and strong data dependencies characteristic of the modelling of networks; they will require us to investigate a number of related design issues, such as domain decomposition, data access and management, workload balancing, and architecture selection.

Biographical Sketch

Albert Y. ZOMAYA is currently the Head of School and the CISCO Systems Chair Professor of Internetworking in the School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney. Prior to joining Sydney University he was a Full Professor in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at the University of Western Australia, where he also led the Parallel Computing Research Laboratory during the period 1990-2002. He is the author/co-author of seven books, more than 300 publications in technical journals and conferences, and the editor of eight books and eight conference volumes. He is currently an associate editor for 15 journals, the Founding Editor of the Wiley Book Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing and a Founding Co-Editor of the Wiley Book Series on Bioinformatics. Professor Zomaya was the Chair the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (1999-2003) and currently serves on its executive committee. He has been actively involved in the organization of national and international conferences. He received the 1997 Edgeworth David Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales for outstanding contributions to Australian Science. He is also the recipient of the Meritorious Service Award (in 2000) and the Golden Core Recognition (in 2006), both from the IEEE Computer Society. Professor Zomaya is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IEEE, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (U.K.), and a Distinguished Engineer of the ACM. His research interests are in the areas of high performance computing, parallel algorithms, mobile computing, and bioinformatics.