Computer Science Colloquium

With the widening gap between processor speeds and disk access speeds, the I/O bottleneck has become critical. In this era when every application demands the processing of voluminous data, the I/O bottleneck takes even more significance. Parallel Disk Systems (PDS) have been introduced to alleviate the problems associated with this bottleneck.

In this talk we give a brief introduction to PDS and summarize algorithms that have been developed for various basic operations. In particular, we consider the sorting and selection (including quantiles finding) problems. These algorithms are not only relevant to the PDS but also to many other parallel models of computing.

Sanguthevar Rajasekaran obtained his B.E. and M.E. degrees from the Indian Institute of Science in 1981 and 1983, respectively. He was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1988 at Harvard University. Since then he has held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Florida (where he was promoted to full professorship in 1999). Currently he is on leave from UF and is serving as the Chief Scientist at Arcot Systems, Santa Clara.

His research interest can be summarized as Applied Algorithms. He has worked in various sub-areas of CS including randomized computing, parallel and high performance algorithms, computational biology, data mining, security, learning theory, parsing, etc. He has published over 100 research articles in journals, conferences, and books. He has co-authored two texts on algorithms and co-edited four other CS books.