Venkatesh Kannan, Ph.D.

Centre Technical Manager

Novel Technologies Programme Manager

Ph.D.

+353 1 529 1028

HPC Hub Dublin

Venkatesh Kannan works as the Technical Manager at the Irish Centre of High-End Computing (ICHEC), the national centre for high-performance computing (HPC) in Ireland, whose core mission is to deliver HPC-related capabilities and expertise to higher education institutions, enterprises and public sector organisations on behalf of the Irish State.

At ICHEC, Venkatesh is responsible for defining and implementing the technological vision, strategy and roadmap of the Centre’s activities. This includes developing partnerships with domestic and international organisations in academia, industry and the public sector to undertake publicly and commercially funded computation-driven R&D and projects. Venkatesh also manages and coordinates the Centre’s technical activities with all members of staff and computational scientists across offices in Dublin and Galway.

ICHEC focuses on HPC and its applications to a wide range of areas, including high-performance data analytics (HPDA), big data management, artificial intelligence, optimisation of computational workflows and applications on a variety of compute platforms including extreme-scale HPC clusters, edge computing devices and quantum computing platforms. These are applied to a wide range of application domains such as environmental sciences, remote sensing, digital healthcare and digital twins.

Venkatesh also represents ICHEC in a number of Irish and European Union programmes, activities and projects.

Prior to ICHEC, Venkatesh has experience in functional programming, program transformation, Petri nets, and system modelling for simulation and analysis. His passion for teaching takes him to academic and industrial training when time permits.

Roles

Coordinator, Quantum Programming Ireland Initiative at ICHEC, 2018 – present.
PI, Quantum Natural Language Programming on Intel Quantum Simulator, 2019 – 2020.
Co-PI/WP leader, PRACE 6IP (EU H2020-INFRAEDI-01-2018), 2019 – 2022.
Task leader, PRACE 5IP-WP7 (EU H2020-INFRAEDI-11-2016), 2017 – 2019.
PI, Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC), 2017 – present.
PI, READEX (EU H2020-FETHPC-1-2014), 2016 – 2018.
Coordinator, collaboration with University of Limerick for National M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence.
Trainer/lecturer for ICHEC courses in HPC for academic and industry participants.

Working Areas & Interests

Exascale computing
Auto-tuning for energy efficiency and performance
Parallel programming models and constructs for extreme-scale and exascale
Parallelisation on accelerators (IXP, GPU)
Functional program transformation for parallelism
Programming quantum platforms
Machine vision, machine/deep learning
Blockchain technology

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland.
Master of Science in Information and Communication Systems, Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Germany.
Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Madras, India.

Grants

PI, “Quantum Natural Language Processing” from Enterprise Ireland and Intel, 2018 (Total & Share: €151,543).
Co-PI/WP Leader, “PRACE 6IP” from EU (H2020-INFRAEDI-01-2018), 2018 (Total: €24M, Share: €580,388).
H2020 coordinator support from Enterprise Ireland, 2017 (Total & Share: €11,920).

Talks and Contributions

Invited talk & panelist, "The CIO's Guide to Quantum Computing", CIO and IT Leaders Summit, Dublin (Ireland), Sep 2019.
Organiser, International Workshop on Architecture-Aware Simulation & Computing (AASC) at the International Conference on High-Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS), Dublin (Ireland), Jul 2019.
Invited talk, "The Reaches of HPC and AI", Tech Connect Live Summit, Dublin (Ireland), Jun 2019.
Talk, "Tuning Alya with READEX for Energy Efficiency", SupercomputingAsia (SCAsia), Singapore, Feb 2019.
Invited talk, "Quantum Programming at ICHEC", All Ireland Quantum Technologies Conference, Maynooth (Ireland), Jan 2019.
Co-chair & invited talk, "Exploiting Application Dynamism for Exascale Energy Efficiency", PRACE-CoEs-FET HPC-EXDCI Workshop, Brühl (Germany), Oct 2018.
Talk, "Demystifying Deep Learning", Deep Learning Day at Microsoft, Dublin (Ireland), Jun 2018.
Talk, "READEX for Exascale Energy Efficiency", International Supercomputing (ISC), Frankfurt a.M. (Germany), Jun 2018.
Invited talk, PRACE-5IP Exascale Systems Workshop, Jülich (Germany), Jun 2017.
Invited talk & trainer, All-India Faculty Development Programme on Heterogeneous Computing and OpenCL by AMD India, Chennai (India), Sep 2011.
Team Mentor, ISRO's SRMSAT-1 Nanosatellite, SRM University (India), 2010-11.

Interests

In his free time (despite nobody has a proof that Venkatesh has "free time" at all) he likes cooking and nature walk. However, it's a common understanding that he does those thing while he is in meetings.

Book Chapters

P.G. Kjeldsberg, R. Schöne, M. Gerndt, L. Riha, V. Kannan, K. Diethelm, M-C. Sawley, J.Zapletal, O. Vysocky, M.Kumaraswamy, and W.E. Nagel, “Runtime Exploitation of Application Dynamism for Energy-efficient Exascale Computing”, System Scenario-based Design Principles and Applications, Springer International Publishing AG, Switzerland, 2018. (under review)

Journals

Ondrej Vysocky, Jan Zapletal, Michael Lysaght, Venkatesh Kannan, Vojtech Nikl, Martin Beseda, Lubomir Riha, “Energy-efficient Computing Achieved by Manual Evaluation of the Dynamic Behaviour of HPC Applications”, Advances in Engineering Software, Elsevier Journal, 2017.
Joseph Schuchart, Michael Gerndt, Per Gunnar Kjeldsberg, Michael Lysaght, David Horak, Lubomir Riha, Andreas Gocht, Mohammed Sourouri, Madhura Kumaraswamy, Anamika Chowdhury, Magnus Jahre, Kai Diethelm, Othman Bouizi, Umbreen Sabir Mian, Jakub Kruzik, Radim Sojka, Martin Beseda, Venkatesh Kannan, Zakaria Bendifallah, Daniel Hackenberg, Wolfgang E. Nagel, “The READEX Formalism for Automatic Tuning for Energy Efficiency”, Springer Computing Journal, 2017.
Venkatesh Kannan and G.W. Hamilton, “Functional Program Transformation for Parallelisation using Skeletons”, 9th International Symposium on High-Level Parallel Programming and Applications (HLPP), revised version in International Journal of Parallel Programming (IJPP), 2018.
Venkatesh Kannan and G.W. Hamilton, “Program Transformation To Identify List-Based Parallel Skeletons”, 4th International Workshop on Verification and Program Transformation (VPT), revised version in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS), 2016.

Conference Proceedings

Ondrej Vysocky, Martin Beseda, Lubomir Riha, Jan Zapletal, Michael Lysaght, Venkatesh Kannan, “MERIC and RADAR Generator: Tools for Energy Evaluation and Runtime Tuning of HPC Applications”, High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering (HPCSE), 2018.
Ondrej Vysocky, Martin Beseda, Lubomir Riha, Jan Zapletal, Vojtech Nikl, Michael Lysaght, Venkatesh Kannan, “Evaluation of the HPC Applications Dynamic Behavior in Terms of Energy Consumption”, 5th International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering (Civil-Comp Press), 2017.
Venkatesh Kannan, G. W. Hamilton, “Distilling New Data Types”, 5th International Valentin Turchin Workshop on Metacomputing (META), 2016.
Venkatesh Kannan, G. W. Hamilton, “Extraction of Data Parallel Computations from Distilled Programs”, 4th International Valentin Turchin Workshop on Metacomputing (META), 2014.
Venkatesh Kannan, Sahena Ahmed, “A Resource Perspective to Wireless Sensor Network Security”, IEEE Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS), 2011.
Venkatesh Kannan, Marc Voorhoeve, Lou Somers, “Datapath Architecture Simulation”, IEEE Proceedings of 23rd European Simulation and Modelling Conference (EUROSIS ESM), 2009.
Venkatesh Kannan, Wil M.P. van der Aalst, Marc Voorhoeve, “Formal Modeling and Analysis by Simulation of Data Paths in Digital Document Printer”, 9th Workshop and Tutorial on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and CPN Tools, 2008.
G. Igna, Venkatesh Kannan, Yang Yang, T. Basten, M. C. W. Geilen, F. W. Vaandrager, M. Voorhoeve, S. De Smet, L. J. A. M. Somers, “Formal Modeling and Scheduling of Datapaths of Digital Document Printers”, Springer Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS), 2008.
Venkatesh K., Aravind S., Ganapath Ram R., Srinivasan T., “A High Performance Parallel IP Lookup Technique Using Distributed Memory Organisation”, IEEE Proceedings of Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC), 2004.

White Papers

Venkatesh Kannan, Ricard Borrell, Myles Doyle, Guillaume Houzeaux, “Tuning Alya for Energy Efficiency with READEX”, Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE 5IP), 2019. (under review)
Venkatesh Kannan, Lubomir Riha, Michael Gerndt, Anamika Chowdhury, Ondrej Vysocky, Martin Beseda, Horak David, Radim Sojka, Jakub Kruzik, Michael Lysaght, “Investigating and Exploit- ing Application Dynamism For Energy-Efficient Exascale Computing”, Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE 4IP), 2017.