![[my picture: =)]](me.jpg)
Office: SMC E-203
Mailing address:
Email is generally the best way to reach me
Phone: 309-341-7479
Fax: 309-341-7601 (Registrar's office)
Email: dbunde@knox.edu
"Official" webpage: https://www.knox.edu/academics/faculty/bunde-david
Knox College Box 100
2 E. South Street
Galesburg, IL 61401
During the academic year, I spend most of my time teaching. In Fall 2024, I am teaching the following:
Courses taught in previous terms
A theme of my teaching at Knox is the integration of parallel computing. Now that multicore processors are the norm, all students need to learn about concurrency and parallelism. Because of this, I have been trying to include relevant topics throughout my courses. I just finished an NSF-supported project to develop materials and teach about using heterogeneous parallel systems, ones with non-uniform computing elements or capabilities. I have previously received NSF support for a project looking at using high-level languages and a broad range of examples. To continue the idea of promoting cool examples and assignments, I curate the collection of Peachy Parallel Assignments, which are peer-reviewed assignments to teach parallel programming concepts selected according to the following criteria: (i) Tested, (ii) Adoptable, (iii) Being cool and inspirational.
I work on a bunch of fun and interesting problems for my research. Currently, my main focus is on resource management for supercomputers. I recently finished an NSF-supported project to maximize supercomputer performance on a new kind of system topology. Supercomputers are really large expensive systems with many (10K+) processors. They are used to solve important scientific and engineering problems. My group doesn't worry so much about using such systems (Knox doesn't have one...), instead focusing on the software required to run them. Primarily, we evaluate our ideas via simulation, but we have done some experiments on real systems at Sandia National Labs. Some of our work has been implemented in SLURM, an open source system for managing clusters.
I also do theoretical work in scheduling. When taking a theoretical approach, I'm looking to prove desirable properties of algorithms, the recipes computers use to solve problems. These properties might be that the algorithm always finds an optimal solution. In scheduling, this is often not possible because the scheduler needs to make decisions without knowing about tasks that are going to arrive in the future. In these cases, I try to find an algorithm that finds schedules that are always nearly as good as the optimal schedule. (It's not clear how you can do this without finding an optimal solution, but it's actually possible for many problems.)
See my list of publications for more details about my work.
If my work sounds interesting to you, please contact me; I'm always looking for students to work with.
Last modified June 2024 by dbunde@knox.edu