Mark P. Blanco
PhD Candidate in Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
Research interests
Graph processing, performance modeling, High Performance Computing (HPC), computer architecture
Education
Started: Sept 2017
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
- Pursing PhD in High Performance Modeling and Computation
- Advisor: Dr. Tze Meng Low, ECE Department
Graduated: May 2017
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
- Dual Major in Computer Systems Engineering and Computer Science
- Member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon and Eta Kappa Nu Honor Societies
Publications
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(Accepted and pending publication): Azad et al. “Evaluation of Graph Analytics Frameworks Using the GAP Benchmark Suite,” 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization
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M. P. Blanco, S. McMillan, T. M. Low, “Towards an Objective Metric for the Performance of Exact Triangle Count,” presented at the 2020 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC), held virtually.
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M. Blanco, T. M. Low, and K. Kim, “Exploration of Fine-Grained Parallelism for Load Balancing Eager K-truss on GPU and CPU,” presented at the 2019 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC), Waltham, MA, USA, p. 7.
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U. Sridhar, M. Blanco, R. Mayuranath, D. G. Spampinato, T. M. Low, and S. McMillan, “Delta-Stepping SSSP: From Vertices and Edges to GraphBLAS Implementations,” in 2019 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), 2019, pp. 241–250.
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Carothers et al. 2017. “Durango: Scalable Synthetic Workload Generation for Extreme-Scale Application Performance Modeling and Simulation,” In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS 2017).
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Mandal et al. 2016. “Toward an end-to-end framework for modeling, monitoring and anomaly detection for scientific workflows.” Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, 2016 IEEE International.
Awards
2019
NSF Graduate Fellowship for Computer Engineering (On tenure)
2019
Graph Challenge Champion at High Performance Extreme Computing
Work Experience
Summer 2019
Graduate Research Intern
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque NM
- Collaborated with researchers at Sandia National Labs to model and optimize a molecular dynamics approach called SNAP.
- Analyzed existing code base performance on CPU architectures from ARM, IBM, and Intel.
- Rewrote existing approach to take advantage of SIMD hardware on all three CPU architectures and worked to develop an analytical performance model for the new approach.
- Attained 1.66x to 3.22x end-to-end application speedups using new approach and auto-vectorization in GCC.
Spring and Fall 2018
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA
- Mentored students in lectures and in office hours on design of efficient, high performance code
- Taught benchmarking techniques utilizing x86 ASM, compiler optimizations, use of SIMD,principles of memory hierarchy, and parallelism via OpenMP and MPI
Summer 2016 & 2017
Software Development Engineering Intern
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA
'17
- Applied data science techniques to improve Office Admin Portal based on customer feedback
'16
- Iterated on discussions with team members to develop and refine customer feedback analysis
Summer & Fall 2015
Undergraduate Computer Science Researcher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY
- Created MPI-based hybrid simulator for parallel workload modeling on supercomputers
- Learned principles of efficient distributed code for use on HPC systems
- Work incorporated into publication of Durango in SIGSIM-PADS’17
Spring 2014 - Fall 2014
Advising and Learning Assistance Center Tutor
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY
- Tutored peers in computer science (Python and C++) in group and one-on-one settings
Projects
Fall 2018
Social Circle Analysis
Project in Machine Learning (10-701)
- Applied autoencoders & unsupervised clustering on social network structure and content
Spring 2018
RL DVFS Governors
Work done in System Level Design group
- Prepared DVFS framework for students in 18-651
- Presented poster on thermal-aware Reinforcement Learning at MLSE’18
Spring 2018
Matrix Inversion Accelerator
Project in Computer Architecture (18-742)
- Explored design space of cache and scratchpad accelerators using Gem5-Aladdin framework
Spring 2018
Parallel and Distributed SGD
Project in Optimization (18-660)
- Implemented and tested scalability of parallel and distributed SGD algorithms
Fall 2017
Multi-kernel CNN Accelerator
Project in Reconfigurable Logic (18-643)
- Designed and demonstrated layer-optimized CNN kernels on Zynq FPGA
Spring 2017
Parallel Finite Element Analysis
Project in Parallel Programming for Engineers
- Implemented 3D method of stiffness for truss deformation in OpenMP & CuBLAS
Related Skills
- C/C++, C#, MPI, CUDA, OpenMP
- MATLAB, Bash, JavaScript, Python, Git
- Experience in technical writing and presentation
- Vivado HLS, embedded programming, PCB design
- Linux kernel programming
- Conversant in French and Spanish