Meet CSE Profile: Ph.D. Student Hua Huang

SC22 is right around the corner and several researchers from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) are presenting at the annual conference.

With this opportunity, we’d like to introduce one of our own, CSE Ph.D. student Hua Huang, to talk about research, Georgia Tech at SC22, and life at the School of CSE.

Student: Hua Huang

Advisor: Edmond Chow

Research Interests: High-performance computing (HPC), parallel computing, computational chemistry

Program Home Unit: CSE

Current Degree Program: Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering

Hometown: Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China

Tell us little bit about your research: I mainly work on designing and implementing high-performance and scalable algorithms used in computational chemistry and other scientific computing tasks.

How did you become interested in HPC? When I was in high school, I occasionally read a blog about the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) project. BOINC aggregates a lot of personal computers into a large “supercomputer” for scientific research. This project inspired my interest in scientific computing and high-performance computing.

You’re presenting at SC22. How are you feeling about this? I am very excited after working from home for almost three years. Online meetings are convenient, but face-to-face communication is irreplaceable. 

At SC22, you’re presenting a new algorithm called CA3DMM. What should people know about this? Matrix multiplication is a well-studied topic in high-performance computing. It is also a building block of modern artificial intelligence computations. Before CA3DMM, some parallel algorithms already have the optimal cost, but they are hard to understand and implement. CA3DMM uses a new and simple approach and still has the optimal cost.

What interested you about Georgia Tech while applying to graduate programs? Georgia Tech is very strong in STEM. Further, many professors work on high-performance computing and scientific computing in the College of Computing. Therefore, I think Georgia Tech has plenty of opportunities for my interest. A minor reason is that Atlanta is in the south, the weather here is better than that in the north.

You attained your M.S. degree at Georgia Tech in 2019 and are currently pursuing your Ph.D. What do you like about Georgia Tech? The diversity of students. CSE has a lot of interdisciplinary studies, so I met many new friends from different home units. It is very interesting to know the things they are doing.

What are some of your hobbies? Running. I run five miles a day as my daily workout. I like running outside since I can enjoy the beauty of nature and sort out my mind.