Amanda Dufek

Amanda Sabatini Dufek is a member of the Application Performance Group at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) since January 2021. She is currently involved in two main projects: (1) Toolkit for Extreme Climate Analysis (TECA), a parallel toolkit for detecting extreme events in large climate datasets; and (2) some parallel implementations using SYCL programming model, such as SU3_Bench and MILC-Dslash benchmarks. She has worked as a NERSC Exascale Science Applications Postdoctoral (NESAP) Fellow at LBNL in 2020. The main goal of her NESAP project for the simulation program was adding two new diagonal ceilings to the roofline model relative to NIC and PCI-e bandwidths to provide insights into how the communication operations are impacting the overall performance of some benchmark problems. As an Institutional Training Program Fellow at the Brazilian National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC) (2016-2019), a multi- and many-threaded heterogeneous parallel version of the Grammatical Evolution algorithm was developed in order to achieve a fully parallel implementation, where both the breeding and evaluation are parallelized. A cooperative algorithmic-level parallel model was also implemented, in which many independent runs of the algorithm are launched simultaneously in a parallel cooperative way. It is a Free Software written in C/C++, OpenMP and OpenCL, freely available at http://github.com/daaugusto/ppi. She also developed a many-threaded parallel version of a bi-level optimization algorithm using an evolutionary method known as Differential Evolution, where both levels are parallelized. It has been written in C/C++ and OpenCL, whose implementation basically consists of a nested execution of two OpenCL kernels. She received her Bachelor (2005) and Master (2008) degrees in Meteorology from the University of São Paulo located in Brazil, and her Doctor (2015) degree in Computational Modeling from the Brazilian National Laboratory for Scientific Computing. She was Assistant Professor of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at University of São Paulo from 2008-2009. Her research interests are: high-performance computing, machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and meteorological problems.