Re: LUMS
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste Multiply that with 160 Million
By Athar Mian
Director of Business Development
Global NorthStar Inc.
Northstar Club Management System - The New Standard in Club Software
Redwood City, CA
We, ex-students of Prof. Shahid Hussain Bokhari , are keen to express our admiration for our mentor. Sadly, Prof. Bokhari decided to retire from UET on October 3rd, 2005 after a brilliant 25-year local teaching and global R&D career. His selfless devotion to teaching on a subsistence pay ($5000 yearly) while refusing prestigious US-based alternatives is truly remarkable.
Dr. Bokhari, a 1978 PhD from UMass-Amherst, USA, is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM (global engineering and computer societies), major honors that resulted from his numerous refereed publications, including a book and pioneering papers on computer architecture, graph theory and Linux software. He is also on the coveted list of Highly Cited Researchers published by the Institute for Scientific Information. After graduation, he has had regular sabbaticals at top R&D institutes in the US and Japan. His industry contributions include multi-million dollar revenues from addressing the Y2K problem in 1999, NASA research (1985-1995), and co-founding a Silicon Valley start-up (2000). His first undergraduate paper was published by the IEEE in the 1970s, while he was enrolled at UET.
Dr. Bokhari himself funded a new computer laboratory at UET via alumni and corporate donations in the late 1990s. This center has educated hundreds of undergrad and grad students and put Pakistan on the global technology map having the 2nd largest Linux teaching laboratory in the world. Dozens of cutting edge refereed and journal publications by well-mentored students, some of whom were working with Silicon Valley US companies, are a great instance of intellectual value-add (as opposed to plain vanilla call center) outsourcing.
His ex-students now include tenured professors, executives, and entrepreneurs both in the US and Pakistan. Dr. Bokhari will certainly be offered tenure at a leading US university given his current active research into new areas. Unluckily the young and talented in Pakistan will miss his mentoring.
Prof. Bokhari’s sudden retirement has been linked to his teaching and R&D policy disagreements with UET and the national HEC (Higher Education Commission) bureaucrats. His suggestions on faculty training and hiring, and a balanced higher education policy were ridiculed and he was forced out of UET’s research council years ago. Even though many new centers and universities (public and private) have sprung up in Pakistan over the years as government and high-tuition funding has flowed in, the results to date have been disappointing. Little genuine research has resulted, but the well-connected with scant credentials have benefited by way of lucrative assignments. Since Prof. Bokhari’s IEEE Fellow status a decade ago, Pakistan has had no other resident Fellow.
As neighboring India, with 1.2 billion people, has absorbed all the technology limelight with its growing outsourcing business (2004 estimates of $14 billion), Pakistan, with a 140 million population, hardly accounts for an annual $200 million today. Given this bitter reality, Dr. Bokhari’s single-handed contributions stand out. We hope that Pakistan can do better with genuine long-term education policies that could raise its global profile from the current shallow one. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Multiply that by 160 million.
Opinion
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Cray MTA-2 and XMT Supercomputers**
Exploring the Performance of Massively Multithreaded Architectures
Shahid Bokhari and Joel Saltz
Abstract
We present a new scheme for evaluating the performance of multithreaded computers and demonstrate its application to the Cray MTA-2 and XMT supercomputers. Our scheme is based on the concept of clock cycles per element, C, plotted against both problem size and the number of processors. This scheme clearly shows if an implementation has achieved its asymptotic efficiency and is much more general than (but includes) the commonly used speedup metric. It permits the discovery of any imperfections in both the software as well as the hardware, and is expected to permit a unified comparison of many different parallel architectures. Measurements on a number of well-known parallel algorithms, ranging from matrix multiply to quicksort, are presented for the MTA-2 and XMT and highlight some interesting differences between these machines. The performance of sequence alignment using dynamic programming is evaluated on the MTA-2, XMT, IBM x3755 and SGI Altix 350 and provides a useful comparison of the capabilities of the Cray machines with more conventional shared memory architectures.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0703139. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Access to the Cray MTA-2 and XMT provided by Cray Inc. Access to the Cray XMT provided by the Center for Adaptive Supercomputing Software–Multithreaded Architectures (CASS-MT) hosted at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Access to the SGI Altix and IBM x3755 provided by Ohio Supercomputer Center.
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Report of Cray MTA-2 and XMT Supercomputers**
http://bmi.osu.edu/~shahid/mtaxmt/bokhariSaltz09.pdf
List of Papers on Cray and XMT Supercomputers
Shahid H. Bokhari
Over the past two years, I have been collaborating with Dan Janies on
developing techniques for analyzing the evolution of segmented viruses,
such as influenza. A paper describing our work “Reassortment Networks
for Investigating the Evolution of Segmented Viruses,” is to appear in the
IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.
Digital Library
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Slides from a talk on Nanopore Sequencing that I have presented at
Penn State, Virginia Tech, William & Mary and the Univ of Virginia.**
http://bmi.osu.edu/~shahid/bokhariPSU.pdf
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NASA Langley Reserach Centre**
http://search.nasa.gov/search/centersearch.jsp?centername=langley&nasaInclude=bokhari
