Presenter

Beau Johnston is a Computer Scientist working for the University of Bristol and Virginia Tech, he was previously in the Programming Systems Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
His research focuses on High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Programming Languages; More specifically, investigating the patterns/characteristics of scientific workloads and their impact on performance over a range of accelerator hardware.
Lately, his work has focused on IRIS---a runtime system for heterogeneity scaling up from smart-phones to super computers---and incorporating it into the SYCL programming language.

During his Ph.D. at the Australian National University, he developed a tool to perform Architecture-Independent Workload Characterization (AIWC -- pronounced | \ 'air-wik) -- which extracts features critical to performance. On a day to day basis, his work uses AIWC to build models for performance prediction, runtime systems and programming language exploration targeted to truly heterogeneous systems
He is a member of the Khronos Group SYCL advisory committee.