Matthew Curtis-Maury, a Computer Science graduate student advised by Dr. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, has been awarded the "Outstanding Graduate Student Award -- Doctoral" by the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. This award recognizes significant research contribution through published research papers, presentations, and most importantly scholarly impact of the doctoral work. Curtis-Maury has received this award, which was presented on Saturday May 10th at the departmental commencement reception, for his dissertation entitled "Improving the Efficiency of Parallel Applications on Multithreaded and Multicore Systems."

The recognized work seeks to understand and address the limitations of parallel applications executing on emerging architectures that exploit many processors and cores to improve performance. Specifically, the dissertation research provides a technique called Dynamic Concurrency Throttling to transparently optimize the parallelism exploited by parallel applications to improve both the performance and energy-efficiency of codes running on these high-end computing systems.

Matthew Curtis-Maury conducted his studies under Dr. Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and completed his Ph.D. in May 2008. He received a B.S. from Wake Forest
University in 2003 and an M.S. from The College of William and Mary in 2005, both in Computer Science. Curtis-Maury has published 13 papers in high performance computing, including at the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and won the best paper award at the International Workshop on OpenMP in 2005. He has accepted a position at NetApp in Raleigh, NC as a File System Performance Development Engineer to begin in June.

Photo: Curtis-Maury accepting the award from Dr. Dennis Kafura.